Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Is Better in 2022?

1. Price

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of price, the answer isn’t directly clear cut. Shopify offers a tiered pricing system starting at $29 a month, though as features get tacked on the price increases. The pro to Shopify’s pricing is that it includes hosting, which can get pretty expensive as your website’s popularity grows when purchased from a third-party. Shopify also offers unlimited products, use of sales channels, and more even on their lowest price plan.

WooCommerce’s pricing model is unique, mostly because there isn’t a cost to use it (or WordPress either). Those looking to save money when running an online store, especially in the early stages might be more inclined to choose WooCommerce as their go-to for price alone. However, building an online store isn’t totally devoid of any costs. You’ll need to pay for your own hosting on WooCommerce, which typically only costs a couple of dollars a month on a shared server and increases as your business grows with it. The risk will be on whether your website has a reliable uptime when running your online store, especially on Black Friday.

So in terms of price, which is better: Shopify vs WooCommerce? WooCommerce wins out if you’re an early stage business or testing out ecommerce. However, more established brands may turn to Shopify for an all-in-one bundle in terms of features and price.

2. Ease of Setup

Shopify and WooCommerce both allow you to set up an online store relatively easily. Their ecommerce website builder allows a non-developer to set up a website without needing technical skills or support. But is one easier than the other? Let’s find out.

When signing up to Shopify, you can follow a step-by-step process of setting up your online store. While most of the process is straightforward, some of the details get missed in early setup. For example, most Shopify stores get set-up with a .myshopify.com domain. However, having your own custom domain name is an important step that many people only do afterwards. You need to separately add your .com domain after setting up your Shopify store.

WooCommerce’s setup is also a bit disjointed. While adding WooCommerce to your WordPress site is pretty straightforward, if you’ve never set up a WordPress site before, you’ll also need to invest and point your hosting, which can take 24 hours. So, there are a few more moving parts, such as setting up WordPress, installing WooCommerce, purchasing hosting, and buying a .com domain, and then of course setting up your website.

When comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify, Shopify wins this round. Keep in mind that you can easily figure both of them out by reading their documentation, blogs, or watching videos to get some extra support in the early stages of building your Shopify or WooCommerce website.

3. Apps vs Plug-ins

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of apps and plug-ins, they both have their own add-ons that you can use to optimize, improve, and increase the features of your online store.

Shopify boasts over 6,000 apps on their App Store, which are all specialized in ecommerce allowing you to add sales channels, better market your website, enhance SEO, and much more. Shopify apps tend to be created by third-party developers who charge monthly subscriptions to use their app on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, this can dramatically increase the cost of running an online store. However, Shopify does have a collection of free apps as well.

WooCommerce also has its own collection of plug-ins, but because it’s hosted on WordPress, you can also tap into all of the plug-ins on WordPress too. WordPress, at the time of writing, has over 59,500 plug-ins you can install on your website. Ultimately, you’ll be able to customize nearly any aspect of your website. Just search for any plug-in to help you solve any problem you have. However, there’s an added benefit too: most of them are free or only require a one time payment. While some are recurring, it’s not as common.

So if you’re deciding on Shopify vs WooCommerce based on customization ability through apps and plug-ins, WooCommerce wins first prize here folks.

4. Theme Design

The look of your website matters. Depending on the type of website you design, you might find yourself browsing through countless themes and templates to find the perfect design for how your website will look. Both Shopify and WooCommerce have their own themes that you can add to your website.

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce, it seems that WooCommerce has a much bigger collection of themes to choose from because it’s hosted on WordPress. You can find thousands of themes that allow you to integrate content and commerce on popular sites, such as ThemeForest and WooCommerce Theme Store.

Shopify, on the other hand, has a smaller pool of themes to choose from. You can find some on the Shopify Theme Store. Shopify offers several free themes but the best ones have a fee attached to them. While Shopify allows store owners to blog, there aren’t many themes with good blog designs unlike WooCommerce.

On ThemeForest, you can find over 8,500 WooCommerce themes, whereas Shopify only has 1,400 themes available.

So, when comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify, WooCommerce has a greater collection of themes available to help you find a website design you love and that works for your business.

5. Payment Gateways

A payment gateway is the company that processes payments on your online store. For example, PayPal is an example of a payment gateway. However, around the world there are dozens of brands that offer payment processing services for different regions.

Shopify and WooCommerce both offer over 100 payment gateways, proving themselves to be the leaders in this space when comparing to other reputable ecommerce platforms.

The only difference between them is that Shopify tacks on an additional fee for payment processing. The percentage added depends on the plan you’ve signed up for. However, WooCommerce doesn’t charge any additional fees for payment processing. Therefore, WooCommerce is better in terms of payment gateways when comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce.

6. Website Maintenance

Shopify and WooCommerce both have regular website maintenance. However, their processes for doing so vary slightly.

On Shopify, you will never need to update your website for the latest version. Shopify automatically updates the website with new layouts, features, and bug fixes constantly. Since Shopify has a full-development team at the company, the process of updating the website is seamless for the merchant. You never have to worry about bug fixes because they’re patched without you even knowing. You also don’t have to worry about issues around big days like Black Friday because Shopify does code-freezes during that period. Ultimately, there’s no down time, loading wait times, or anything like that while using Shopify.

WooCommerce and WordPress have store updates as well. However, you need to choose to update to the latest version. The downside to this is that you’re liable if you don’t update your website for bug fixes and so on. The upside is that you decide whether or not to install a version in case you don’t like what the newest version offers. In this case, WooCommerce gives you the freedom of choice.

When comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in terms of website maintenance, Shopify wins this round for not burdening users to have to install updates but we commend WooCommerce for letting us keep a version we love if we want to.

7. Scaling Your Business

Your business can continue to grow on both WooCommerce and Shopify. WooCommerce has had some huge brands on it’s platform. The only downside to it is that hosting costs will grow as your business grows, whereas you can stay on Shopify’s $29 a month plan even with millions of visitors. There’s tight competition when comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify in terms of scalability because both platforms have hosted some of the biggest names and brands you’ll find online. You can browse some of the most popular Shopify stores.

8. Content Marketing

Both Shopify and WooCommerce allow you to build a blog on their platform. With SEO being one of the biggest sources of website traffic for brands, SEO and content marketing are a crucial part of building a big name brand.

Shopify has several SEO apps in it’s app store allowing you to better optimize your website for search engines. It has a simple content management system that you can create blog content for too. You can easily change slugs, redirect pages, and more in Shopify too.

WooCommerce was built on WordPress so it’s safe to say that WooCommerce’s content marketing and SEO capabilities can stretch farther. WordPress has many of the best SEO plug-ins you can find online and many of them haven’t created apps for Shopify yet. WooCommerce also has many more blog-friendly themes that allow you to build a huge blog alongside an online store so that your blog readers can easily find your store. It also allows you to copy and paste documents from Google Docs without any formatting issues.

Overall, when comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce in relation to content marketing and SEO, WooCommerce is the premier choice for merchants looking to scale through search.

9. Dropshipping and Print-on-Demand

WooCommerce and Shopify have plug-ins and apps that allow you to build dropshipping or print-on-demand stores.

You’ll find dropshipping apps that allow you to sell products from AliExpress on your own website in only a few clicks. However, Shopify allows you to do more than just AliExpress dropshipping. You could also install AliExpress alternative apps to dropship from Etsy, or create a print-on-demand business. You can add several different print-on-demand apps to include hundreds of unique products with custom designs on your website, only paying for each product sold rather than a monthly subscription.

WooCommerce has countless WooCommerce dropshipping plug-ins that allow you to dropship from AliExpress, Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. You can even find single apps that allow you to dropship from different platforms, making it more convenient in a lot of ways. You’ll also find pages of print-on-demand companies like Gooten and many more.

While Shopify has exclusive apps on it’s platform, WooCommerce still has plug-ins that offer the same functionality. Both choices are worthwhile if you plan on building a print-on-demand or dropshipping store.

10. Customer Support

With hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers on their platform, there’s always a way to learn how to maximize sales, fix issues, and receive support while building your online store.

Shopify offers customer support through live chat, email, and phone. Some of their support via email is available in multiple languages. In addition, Shopify has help docs, blog posts, webinars, and even online courses that you can access to educate yourself about ecommerce, marketing, and business in general.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a bit more complex when it comes to customer support. If you’re having issues with hosting, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider. If you’re having an issue with a plug-in, you’ll need to reach out to the plug-in creator. Themes purchased through a third-party will require you to get support from the creator. Overall, while it’s still possible to receive support for a WooCommerce theme, you’ll need to reach out to different companies for different components of your website making it more tedious and complicated.

Overall, Shopify’s support is more comprehensive and more convenient to get a hold of, making them the winner of this round.

Conclusion

So, Shopify vs WooCommerce, which is better? If you’re looking for an all-in-one ecommerce solution that allows you to easily set-up your website, get support, and still allows you to scale with ease, Shopify is the best option. If you’re looking for maximum customization, a content and commerce machine, and affordable pricing, WooCommerce is your best bet. Overall, both platforms are used by some of the biggest platforms online, so there’s no bad choice here. Choose the platform that works best for your business’ needs.

The post Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Is Better In 2022? appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one website to another website.

For example: In one of our previous articles, a Shopify Review, our opening sentence reads:

“It’s been long overdue that we post a Shopify review on A Better Lemonade Stand.”

In that sentence, we included a link to Shopify, the business that we’re making reference to, and that’s a backlink for Shopify.

Any link from another website to yours is considered a backlink to your site. Any link on your website to another page on your website is called an internal link. As a website, your goal is to get quality (more on that soon) backlinks from other websites because it increases your website value, so you increase your ranking position in search results.

Why Backlinks are Important

Backlinks are important because search engines read them as a way of websites vouching for one another which helps to improve the rank and domain authority (think of this as credibility) of the linked site. However, these days, site owners practice link building with sites in relevant industries because relevancy is an important factor. So, it’s not as simple as getting links from any site.

In the example mentioned above, when we’re linking out to Shopify from A Better Lemonade Stand, Google reads that and come to the conclusion that:

• Shopify is likely a reputable website because A Better Lemonade Stand is linking out to them, and;
• A Better Lemonade Stand is likely in the same industry as Shopify.

Backlinks are recognized by search engines as a vote of confidence and the more reputable websites that link back to your own website, the more reputable it makes your website seem to search engines by association. To simplify this, a link from CNN is seen is much more credible and valuable than a link from Joe’s random thought blog that he started 2 weeks ago.

When you have other websites with high domain authority vouching for your website it helps to improve your organic search engine ranking, you get indexed faster and you also get direct referral traffic from websites that are relevant to yours which means targeted traffic gets passed on to you and you’ll experience a lower bounce rate.

How Backlinks are Measured

That being said, different websites are ranked differently in a variety of ways when it comes to reputation, and that, amongst other variables, affects how backlinks are measured.

No backlinks are created equally. They depend on a variety of ranking factors that are, for the most part, speculated.

DOMAIN & PAGE STRENGTH

Website authority can be measured in two different ways:

• The overall strength of the domain
• The strength of the URL

This means that, for example, abetterlemonadestand.com has its own rank of website authority as one entire domain, whilst abetterlemonadestand.com/blog (or this particular blog post) will have an independent authority that’s connected to the domain but separate still because it is its own page.

Bonus: To better understand domain and page authority, check out this free website and page authority checker. To use it, just enter some of your favorite websites to see what their domain and page scores are.

NOFOLLOW & DOFOLLOW LINKS

Backlinks can also be measured by being either nofollow and dofollow links.

• Nofollow links are when a website links to another but it doesn’t boost the external website’s page rank or change it’s placement in search results. Nofollow links are often used by websites if they’re linking to an unverified source for any reason, don’t want to be associated to the page they’re linking out to, or in the case of paid sponsorships, as per Google’s advertising guidelines, they require those links to be nofollow.
• Dofollow links exist when one website links to another one and they want search engines to consider that link as a vote of confidence for the website they’re linking out to. Dofollow links are common when websites or blogs are linking out to other websites or blogs and see no detriment in being associated with that website in the eyes of the search engine.

Note: Generally most links are DoFollow links unless the author of a website, post, or page specifically decides to make a link or set of links NoFollow. NoFollow links are identified by adding the nofollow attribute to the link code.

For example:

• A DoFollow link will look like this: <a href=”https://www.shopify.com”>Shopify</a>
• A NoFollow link will look like this: <a href=”https://www.shopify.com” rel=”nofollow”>Shopify</a>

One important exception to note is easily self-attainable backlinks from self-posting sites/forums and social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, or comment sections of blogs) are almost always NoFollow.

Bonus: To get a better idea of which links around the web are DoFollow vs. NoFollow, download the NoFollow for Chrome extension. It will highlight all links and show you which ones are DoFollow and which ones aren’t.

LINK PLACEMENT

Link placement is also thought to play a role in how search engines rank backlink authority. If a link is included in the context of written content on the page of a website it’s thought that search engines place more emphasis on it because it’s more likely to be relevant to the content of the website overall and is likely to be clicked more than links that are placed elsewhere on a webpage such as in the footers or sidebars.

ANCHOR TEXT

What words the link is linked to on a page is also thought to be an indicator to search engines of how relevant it is, this is known as Anchor Text. For example, anchor text is the words where the link is tethered to. For search engines, these words are indicative that they’re relevant to the content and likely to be clicked.

As another example, in the yellow bonus section above we purposely linked to a free website and page authority checker and specifically chose the words that were linked. Google and other search engines read and register the words that are linked (anchor text) and these words help search engines better understand what the page or website you’re linking to is about and what it should rank for in search engine results. By specifically linking the descriptive words like “free website and page authority checker,” we have provided that website with a quality backlink that helps search engines better understand what they are and what they do, and we help that website rank higher for some keywords that are important to them and to other people finding them.

LINK RELEVANCY

Finally, link relevancy also plays a role in determining the strength of a backlink. Depending on several factors that search engines are well equipped to measure such as anchor text, other outbound links, keywords, H-Tags, the context surrounding the links and more, each of those helps determine whether a link is relevant to the overall content of the page and therefore whether the backlink is relevant or not.

Search engines place an emphasis on rewarding websites with authority via backlinks carefully and measure the relevancy of links in a variety of different ways to ensure that the backlinks are authentic and not spammy to encourage well-constructed content by websites that are relevant and helpful to searchers so they find what they’re looking for. Search engines reward websites that meet their demand with higher domain and URL authority as well as relevant organic traffic.

Low-Quality Links & Spam

Acquiring links from websites or web pages that have been deemed by search engines to have low domain strength because they’re any combination of being low-quality sources, inappropriate, or spam can result in penalizing your own website. It’s important to not fall into the trap of thinking that more backlinks from more sourcing all pointing back to your website will increase your website’s rank authority in the eyes of search engines. It’s the quality of backlinks that counts more than the quantity. Aim to get links from authoritative sites that are relevant to your own in terms of subject matter and search engines will reward you with increased search traffic over time.

How to Get Backlinks

Now that you have a background on what backlinks are, why they’re important, and how they’re measured by search engines, let’s dive into the ways you can build backlinks for your own website.

1. Reddit Social Proof Method

For those who haven’t already started using the forum Reddit for your business, now is the perfect time to start getting acquainted with it. It’s a very particular kind of forum with savvy users, so if you’re unfamiliar with their content policy, what “subreddits” are and proper “Reddiquette”, get familiar with it before you start using these next two methods to build backlinks

The purpose of this method is to give value, get upvotes, and then replace the content of the socially-proofed post with a link to your site.

Here’s how to perform it:

• Create a remarkable piece of content (more on that in our Content Strategy article).
• Find the subreddit within Reddit that best suits the niche you’re trying to target (make sure to thoroughly search through all the different subs to find the right one (or ones) that is relevant to your content. Relevancy is key as Redditors don’t appreciate spam and this method won’t work if the right niche of people aren’t engaged with the post).
• Create a post to that subreddit following that sub’s community guidelines (this step of the process is crucial. You have to approach your post on the subreddit very carefully. You cannot just post a link to your content and expect the subscribers of that sub to see the value in it, you have to give value first).
• Whilst creating the post, include all the valuable information you discuss in the remarkable piece of content you created. Your goal is to tell people the details you discuss in your piece content, why it’s interesting and why it’s relevant to them, and then, after you provide a thorough few paragraphs of information and if the community guidelines permit it, include a link to your piece of content and let users know they can click on that link for the full article.
• Once you’ve created that post, publish it to the subreddit.
• Once the post has been up for several hours and it’s generated a significant amount of upvotes and comments, edit the original message of your post to just include the link to your piece of content so that users will then have to click through to your web page to view the content. This only works if you’ve generated a significant amount of upvotes and comments.

Links on Reddit start off as nofollow links and as we discussed earlier in this article, that means that there is no link juice transferring over from Reddit to any outgoing links, unless, and this is the important part, a certain amount of upvotes are achieved and then those links become dofollow. The actual number of upvotes isn’t public knowledge, but through educational speculation and testing, it’s widely believed that this theory is true. Getting a dofollow backlink from Reddit is hugely beneficial as their rank and domain authority is very high.

Test out this backlink building method for yourself but remember not to be spammy on Reddit, follow the community guidelines, give value and get social proof first then leave a link to your piece of content and hopefully get some high-value link juice and referral traffic.

Example: Below is an example screenshot of the /r/entrepreneur subreddit. You can see from the highlighted link colors which ones are DoFollow (Purple) and which ones are NoFollow (Red).

2. Create Remarkable Content

If you post remarkable content consistently that’s interesting, engaging, valuable, and helpful, you’ll get high-value websites linking out to you organically without having to ask for a backlink.

This is a difficult method because it takes a lot of time to produce helpful and valuable content consistently and to sustain it over a long period of time. Even if you publish high-value content on your website from day one it’s going to take a while for others to take notice of your effort and in the meantime, it’s easy to get discouraged due to lack of an engaged audience. The difficult part is providing value on a consistent basis over a long enough time period to generate an engaged audience that supports your efforts. Once you reach that point you’ll start to see backlinks from other high-value sources start to come in and that’s when you reap the rewards of the work you put in creating remarkable content from day one.

Until then, you just have to create content that’s interesting, engaging, and helpful, promote it via every possible method, and work on every other link building method.

Bonus: For more on how to create remarkable content, check out our content strategy blog post where we share all our secrets with you.

3. Create Linkbait Content

Link building works best when you don’t need to do a lot of upfront work to get it. A simple hack to get quality backlinks to your site is to create linkbait content. For example, statistics and studies are some of the most linked to pieces of content. By creating content around industry stats for your niche, you can have more people linking out to your content. Depending on your industry, you can also collaborate with a local university or college to do a study in your industry so people link out to your content.

Alternatively, you can also create custom linkable images like infographics with stats compiled. That way, if the research isn’t your own you can include it with a source section on the bottom of the page but still benefit from quality backlinks while ensuring the source gets credit.

4. Get a Link from Your Manufacturer/Wholesaler/Supplier

Depending on your manufacturer, this may be an easy method to build a backlink. Basically, you want to reach out to the manufacturer who you source your products from and ask that they link you as a retailer of their products on their website, or link you as a business that they work with. Manufacturers are likely to have aged domains which are thought to be a high ranking factor by search engines. The older the domain the more authority it keeps.

The difficulty of this method is middle of the range because your manufacturer may not have a place for this kind of link on their website or they simply may not want to link out to you. If your manufacturer is open to the idea it’s an easy link to get but if not, you’re out of luck.

Beyond the difficulty of this method, the value of this backlink also lays in the middle of the range. It won’t be a low-value or spammy backlink by any means, but it also might not give you super high-quality link juice like you would be getting from a high-authority domain. That being said, if you can get your manufacturer to link out to you then it’s relatively easy to acquire and it’s one more backlink than you had before.

Before you reach out to your manufacturer make sure you have a reputable-looking website with some valuable content on it (like we discussed in the previous method) so the manufacturer is more likely to link out to you. They want to make sure they’re linking out to a reputable website as well so make sure you look like one.

Example: Below is an example of Beardbrand’s list of online resellers. When you sell other branded products, it’s usually in the best interest of the supplier or manufacturer to link to you, providing your store with a valuable backlink.

5. Interview Authorities in Your Niche

Seek out “authorities” in your niche, whether they be bloggers, influencers, speakers, entrepreneurs, creators, etc. and interview them. Post the content to your website and reach out to whomever you interviewed and let them know about the content you created.

More often than not the person will share your content, whether it’s on social media or, if you’re lucky, on their own website, and you’ll generate a backlink from it. People love it when they get noticed, even if it’s by a smaller player in their niche, so you will likely be recognized.

The trick with this method is to be persistent in every way. Persistently pursue influencers when you’re reaching out to interview them and persistently pursue influencers when you’re reaching out to share your content with them. It’s likely that they have a lot of emails coming in at any given time, so persistently follow up with them. The more eager you seem the more likely they will be to engage with you. Always be polite, don’t get upset or offended if they aren’t getting back to you, but do be persistent.

If they have a press page also ask to be featured on there as you’ll get a prominent backlink that is likely to have high authority. Build a relationship with the person you interview, generate some good content, and then work on getting the backlink.

6. Republish Old Content

Don’t let great content that you’ve created in the past go to waste. There are some websites where you can syndicate content which means that articles that you’ve published on your own website can be re-published on other websites relevant to your niche that have a much larger and diverse following than your own website. This enables you to get your content out in front of a larger audience and the original source of the content (your website) will get a link back to acknowledge where it was originally published.

Well known websites where you can syndicate your content include:

• Business 2 Community
• Huffington Post
• Lifehacker
• Medium
• Social Media Today

While it’s commonly thought that content syndication can lead to penalization from search engines for publishing duplicate content, that isn’t the case because there will be a link back to the original piece of content acknowledging its origin. Oftentimes the original creator of the content will also add a new introduction or title to the content as a means to differentiate it from the original post, but that’s optional.

Look for high-quality sites you can syndicate your content to (like the ones we mentioned above) so that you get valuable link juice from an authoritative domain. This method is also likely to generate social shares and put your content in front of an audience that’s interested in your niche so you’ll be gaining valuable referral traffic as well.

Bonus: For an additional 46 publications that accept republished content along with the appropriate contact info, please see this list, originally curated by the good folks at Sumo.

7. Reach out to media sources

You can get a lot of high quality backlinks by reaching out to the media. Keep in mind that while media sites have high domain authority, most of the time they aren’t relevant. So don’t focus on this strategy exclusively to ensure that you have a well-rounded backlink profile.

You can build links using sites like Help A Reporter Out (HARO). This tool will send you emails three times a day (morning, noon, evening) with various reporters reaching out for sources for their articles. Not all pitches are accepted, so aim to put a unique spin to your response.

Alternatively, you can also reach out to niche magazines to promote your blog, business, or app for a potential feature. Not only will this help you get a backlink but it might also help you generate more sales too.

8. Guest Posting

One of the most authentic ways to build a backlink is to guest post on someone else’s blog and earn a link back to your website in the byline or add some relevant contextual links to your website throughout the piece of content. When you guest post on someone else’s website you’re able to showcase your expertise in front of a new audience and control which pieces of your own context you link out to. It’s also a mutually beneficial relationship for you and the website host as you provide them with valuable content and they provide you with a quality backlink.

Securing guest post assignments isn’t always easy and you’ll likely have to start small and build a portfolio before you earn guest posts on larger blogs. Your best strategy is to be persistent, polite, eager, and let the website hosts know what value you have to offer. Always lead with what value you have to offer them, not with what you’re hoping to get out of it as they’ll be much more receptive to your guest posting pitch if they see that you genuinely have value to give and want to share it with their audience.

If you plan to reach out to other websites to guest post for them make sure your own site has valuable content already published on it so they have some way to gauge whether you’d be a good fit for their audience or not. Make sure your website looks professional and like you would fit into their niche market. Don’t forget to peruse their website and see if they have any guest post requirements or any particulars your guest post would need to meet such as a specific word count or formatting.

9. Promote on social media

Those wondering how to get backlinks should consider promoting their website on social media despite some of the no-follow links pointing back at your site. Link building on social media means that you’re guaranteed a link and might also get some decent website traffic back.

If you’re promoting blog content, the two easiest social platforms to promote links on are Pinterest and Quora. The cool thing about Pinterest is that it’s a search-based image site for links. You can use a keyword research tool to find the site content with the most search volume and start posting those links on Pinterest first. While you won’t get high quality backlinks from it due to no-follow, you can generate a lot of traffic back to your site. Plus, when something goes viral on Pinterest, it typically ranks higher in search results too. So double win.

Quora is also pretty laid back about including external links to your site on their platform, as long as your response is at least a few of paragraphs long. Link building strategies centered around social media tend to be beneficial for traffic too, so it’s an additional bonus to link building.

10. Broken link outreach

Using SEO tools, you can find websites with broken links based on keywords. For example, say you own a fitness app, you might search for articles that link to the “best fitness apps” and scrape a tool to find broken links in the article. Then, you reach out to those sites and tell them that you found a broken link on their website and your site could replace it. This is a link building strategy that’s really effective for cold, outreach emails.

You can also use a target keyword for other pages that your article has. For example, if someone links to a study that has a broken link, you might promote one of your statistics webpages with a newer updated link they can replace it with. You don’t need to do a Google search to find this information, but you can also do it manually if you can’t find free tools that do this.

11. Product Reviews

If you have a certain product you’d like to promote to an audience, getting a blogger, influencer or another website to publish a review of your product is a valuable way to not only have your product featured in front of an audience that’s relevant to your niche, but a great way to get a contextual backlink as well.

As per search engine ranking systems, product reviews garner high ranking backlink authority because they fulfill many of the high-value ranking requirements such as optimal link placement (within the post itself, not in a sidebar or footer) and link relevancy (within a relevant niche). If it is a sponsored product review, which depending on the website you work with they may only accept sponsored product reviews, as per Google guidelines, the link will have to be a nofollow link as opposed to a dofollow link, which isn’t ideal for a backlink but is still thought to provide some ranking power.

Make sure you reach out to reputable websites for product reviews, and as we recommended with guest posting you may have to start with being featured on smaller websites before you’re able to get onto more popular ones. Approach potential product reviewers with some fact-based data of your product such as how many units you’ve sold, what your customer/market demographics are or how much revenue you’ve earned so you can give reviewers a way to gauge the demand of your product or what target market would be interested in it. Always lead with what value you have to offer the reviewer, be persistent, polite, eager, have a valuable product with some reputable reviews or data backing it up, find reviewers that serve a relevant niche to yours, and have your own professional looking website.

Product Review Sites:

• Bless This Stuff
• Cool Material
• Firebox
• Gear Moose
• HiConsumption
• Product Hunt
• Uncrate
• Werd

12. Try influencer marketing

Every company has potential influencers in it. It could be your content creator, social media team, founder, or even product person. By using the spokespeople in your company, you can get backlinks from making statements and being included in expert round-ups.

Those active on social platforms like LinkedIn or on your website’s blog, could easily be quoted by another website, with a backlink included to their personal website or workplace. You can get more links by being active online and creating quotable content. If someone links to your social media instead, you can look up your brand mentions and ask for a link to your website instead.

13. Reach out to “Resource” pages

Many popular websites have resource pages. In the ecommerce community, many people refer to them as “partner” pages. By looking up listicles of popular blogs, websites, or even Shopify Apps, you’ll find countless resource pages.

You can then reach out to those companies who have set them up and ask to be included. This is an easy way to get a backlink to your website from a company who is willing to give them out. Often, resource pages show that a company is backlink-friendly.

You can find resource pages manually by going through lists of websites in your niche, browsing app stores, or through a Google search. You can also try the broken link tactic for these pages too if you notice that another site featured in the section is no longer active.

14. Request a Link

Search for blogs or websites that have conducted roundup lists or compilations of products, businesses or websites in your niche and ask to be added to the list.

For example, we occasionally get requests from businesses operating a graphic design service to add their website to our blog post, 200+ Free and Premium Graphic Design Resources. From our perspective, this is a mutually beneficial request: It enables us to keep our list up-to-date with the best resources out there and the business is able to get a dofollow backlink without having to guest post, comment on our blog posts, pay for a product review or republish their own content, and the link placement and relevancy is perfect. It’s also a simple request, you’re asking to be added to the already existing post, so it’s a fairly simple request for businesses to fulfill.

Look for posts where your website would just be a simple addition to the post, you’re not looking to re-write it. Find posts that are roundups or ones that have numbers in the title. See what your niche has to offer and just reach out! Make sure your website or product is relevant though, there’s no point if it’s not.

15. Unlinked Mentions Method

One of the ways on how to get backlinks is by doing the unlinked mentions method. As your website grows in popularity, you’ll notice that people start mentioning your website, app, or brand. Sometimes, they link to another article about your website whereas other times there aren’t any links at all.

If you’re looking for a good link building technique, you can use tools for online mentions and reach out to websites asking for a link. You can get high quality backlinks to your website using this method. If you notice that a link was missed, these sites can be added to your list of referring domains.

16. Contact competitor’s backlinks

Using SEO tools, you can easily see all the backlinks your competitor’s get. You can find countless referring domains for any popular website on the internet. By looking up all your competitors, you can sort through their referring domains to determine which sites link out to competitors the most. Then, you can contact those websites and ask for links to your site.

By looking at the website before reaching out, you can create a more personalized message. You can also look up the best ranking content on their site to see if there’s any alignment with your articles and business. Find out if there are any link building opportunities by doing cold outreach or by contacting the SEO employee at that company.

17. Subreddit Moderator Method

This is a very little known method of generating backlinks on Reddit and is lower in difficulty than the last method because you don’t have to generate social proof as a means of turning the backlink into a dofollow link. Even if you have no previous experience using Reddit this is an accessible way to get backlinks without having to engage with subreddit communities.

Here’s how to generate dofollow links to your website from Reddit:

• Create your own subreddit (please note that your Reddit account will have to be at least 30 days old and you’ll need to have a small amount of positive karma).
• Once you’ve created your own sub, you don’t have to post anything to it ever (if you don’t want to) but the value comes from linking your content in the sidebar. As a subreddit owner/moderator, you have the ability to add relevant links and information to your subreddit’s sidebar.
• Every time you have a new piece of content or a webpage you can to link out to, add it to the sidebar of your own subreddit and that will generate dofollow links to your website from Reddit.

As we’ve said above, Reddit is a high-value domain to receive link juice from, so a dofollow backlink from Reddit is beneficial and this is one of the easiest ways to get them. Please note, however, that your subreddit’s webpage will have a much lower authority than Reddit’s domain authority, but you will still acquire link juice and a backlink associated with Reddit.

18. Create more webpages

This might be a given, but the more webpages your site has the easier it is to get backlinks. Having a static one-page website will be much harder to get backlinks to than a website with landing pages, a blog, or multiple product pages. Content marketing is an important part of link building. Without tons of content, it’ll be a harder ask for backlinks. So, if you want to know the secret on how to get backlinks: build a blog.

A quick Google search shows that there are tons of topics you can write about that are relevant to your niche. You can use a free tool for keyword research to come up with ideas. But by writing relevant content in your space, search engines will understand what your website is about and you’ll rank higher in results in that industry. Relevant sites will be more likely to start link building with you. So write some long form content on a regular schedule and stick with it for years to come, so people can rely on your expertise in your industry.

19. Add your own internal links

While building links can be quite a challenge, there’s an easy way to get links to your site: practice internal link building. While you won’t get the same elevation in ranking from an internal link, there are many benefits to adding links to other pages of your websites, such as lowering bounce rate and keeping people on your site.

You can add internal links easily. The more content you have, the more likely that keywords you’ve written about show up in an article. Relevant websites will typically have multiple topics in the same area which makes internal linking easier.

20. Rank higher in search

You can attract links by ranking higher in search. Most people don’t do thorough searches when linking out to another website. If creating link building campaigns and doing cold outreach scares you, you’ll want to rank high in search results to get a few links organically. Referring domains typically pick the top articles to link out to or the article with the exact search intent they’re looking for.

Keep in mind that without backlinks, it’s hard to rank high in search. So if you’re playing the organic game, it’ll be a slow climb up. How many backlinks you get organically will depend on how many articles are ranking in the top three positions in search. But it is possible to earn backlinks organically without doing outreach.

Conclusion

Now you know the top 10 ways you can build backlinks to your website. We encourage you to try out each method for yourself and see what response you get. Don’t forget to be persistent, polite, and eager whilst still providing value when reaching out to other websites. Building backlinks is a marathon, not a sprint so be diligent about building a link here and there over time and they’ll begin to accumulate. First things first though, start working on remarkable content, a valuable product, and a beautiful website if you haven’t already so that you have something to direct potential collaborators to. Remember, it’s the quality of backlinks that count, not the quantity, so aim for quality.

The post How to Build Backlinks: 20 Ways to Get Backlinks to Your Store appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

Americans spent nearly 10 percent more on home improvement projects in 2020, according to Home Advisor. Now, more than ever, the average consumer deeply cares about how their living spaces look.

It’s no wonder why the global home decor market, valued at $616.6 billion in 2019, is expected to reach $838.6 billion by 2027.

Source: Research and Markets

For brands to leverage this booming market, they must reach people. But for a space that’s remained traditionally brick-and-mortar, is selling online the best idea for home decor retailers?

Yes, as it turns out. Ecommerce is driving the sales of home decor. Consumers want to put a lot of love into their homes today, and they’re relying on the digital world to help them out.

Here, we explore why home decor brands need to sell online and how they can begin.

Why selling online is no longer optional for home decor brands

People were already getting used to the idea of purchasing home decor online even before the COVID-19 crisis. Williams-Sonoma and its brands like West Elm and Pottery Barn saw 52.8% of their retail sales come through ecommerce in 2018.

The pandemic has only added greater urgency to this effort:

• The home-products and furnishings category saw a year-over-year (YOY) online sales increase of 97% in March 2020.
• Furniture Today showed a 200% surge in online furniture browsing, 242% increased browsing for desks, 260% jump in searching for outdoor furniture online, and a 205% increase in browsing for home decor in March 2020.
• 58% of millennials, nearly half of Generation X, and 37% of baby boomers say they were more likely to shop for home furnishing online now than pre-pandemic.

Source: Statista

• Websites selling home decor and furniture products online generated 1.7 billion visits in March 2020.

Brands with an established online presence during the COVID shutdown could keep up with sales, despite physical stores getting closed. For instance, DTC home furnishing brand Article shared that April 2020 was their highest revenue month to date, with sales up 200% year over year.

But many retailers weren’t prepared for the pandemic-induced digital shift. They were heavily dependent on in-person sales, with poorly-built websites lacking advanced features for online shopping.

It’s no wonder the home furnishing industry suffered a 26.4% YOY decline in March 2020—translating to billions of dollars in lost revenue.

And for retailers, growth is expected to continue accelerating. A report by Technavio predicts the online home decor market will grow by $83.32 billion during 2020-2024 and reach $348.3 billion by 2027.

Source: Research and Markets

So, online sales aren’t going anywhere. The coronavirus crisis is a testimony to how critical it is for modern brands to have a digital presence.

Being online doesn’t mean shutting down your brick-and-mortar store. The most successful home decor brands are taking a more wholesome approach and developing an omnichannel strategy—allowing consumers to shop hassle-free online or offline.

Here’s how to set up your home decor brand for omnichannel success.

How home decor brands can sell online: Everything you need to know

Opportunities for home decor brands to enter the home are abundant. The barrier to entry is minimal, and no company holds a monopoly—Semisupervised’s 2021 study of 1,111 DTC brands placed “home and garden” in the least saturated category.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a home decor business or taking your existing one online, now is the time. Here’s your step-by-step guide to getting started:

1. Find what you want to sell (and how)

The easiest way to differentiate your brand from the mass market is by offering a unique product to a niche audience.

What you choose to sell depends on your budget, area of expertise, and preferred business model. For example, you can work with a manufacturer to create your furniture or you can make the furniture in-house and work with consumers on a made-to-order model.

You don’t have to come up with an entirely new product, either. You can sell to a niche audience with minor modifications to a popular category. Take Ordinary Habit and Goodfit, for example. Both make puzzles—but while Ordinary Habit aims to design artful games that help people get away from screens, Goodfit makes puzzles reflecting modern culture through recycled cardboard. Same product—targeting two different types of consumer markets.

What you sell also relies heavily on how much you can invest. The amount of money you need to get your business off the ground depends on your product choice and business model. For instance, a print-on-demand business won’t require much investment upfront since you’re buying materials as you go. But a furniture business might need storage and warehouse space—requiring capital right at the beginning.

You don’t have to go big or go home—you can begin humbly. Farah Mehri started her home decor brand Inspire Me! from her Instagram account. After four years of teaching her Instagram audience how to make their homes warm and inviting, she started her own product line.

Source: Instagram

Like Farah, you can begin small with what you can afford and gauge the demand in the market before you scale.

2. Build your brand online

Successful brands are strategic. You need to carve out a brand story, set your visual aesthetic, decide your vision and mission, and solidify your ideal consumer.

Building a brand gives you an edge over your competitors and makes you more memorable. Data shows 77% of brands can simply disappear, and no one would care. You wouldn’t want to be one of those brands, would you?

Branding is essential in home decor categories where consumers largely make logic-driven purchases—like furniture and mattresses. Infrequent purchases mean buyers often spend significant amounts of time evaluating choices, comparing brands, and seeing what goes with their style.

Picking brand guidelines also acts as a reference when you map content for your website and social media. 68% of brands in one study report that brand consistency has contributed 10-20% to their revenue growth.

Source: Lucidpress

Take sustainable furniture company Knoll. They highlight their operational footprint and product processes on their website and even publish a sustainability report.

Source: Knoll

According to one study, 86% of consumers claim there are certain products for which they’ll purchase only from a brand name.

Building a brand can help consumers identify you from the noise and keep coming back for more.

3. Build a top-notch online store and website

Your website and online store are the faces of your company—determining how consumers perceive your brand. You want to capture your consumers and leave a positive impression fast.

Don’t know where to begin?

BigCommerce makes it easy for you to set up your store even if you aren’t big on tech or coding. The platform is highly customizable, letting you design your online store and website to match your brand. You can also purchase your domain name for your store directly from BigCommerce.

While designing your website, don’t make the mistake of skimping on the details of product photography, succinct descriptions about your product, and a consistent color scheme. Here are the elements to take care of:

Homepage

Your homepage is the first thing consumers see when they land on your website. It should talk about what you care about the most and what your existing consumers love about you.

Many brands like Frama—a lifestyle objects company—also opt for displaying their bestsellers and the latest content on their homepage so consumers can immediately start purchasing from them.

Source: Frama

Another thing you need to take care of on your homepage is navigation. Consumers should be able to find their way around your website easily—your brand story, your product categories, a way to contact you, and any FAQs.

Since the homepage is the first impression of your brand to consumers, don’t be afraid to sprinkle some personality. Take the hardware brand, Yuns. It has a homepage with minimal distractions, a stand-out cursor, and a unique experience.

Source: Yuns

Product categories 

If you sell various products, you must separate them into different web pages for the best consumer experience. Howards Storage World’s mega-menu navigation gives customers a quick overview of the various subcategories they can shop from—both visually and textually.

Source: Howards Storage World

You can also apply trends & demand and divide your product categories for what consumers might be searching for right now. For example, Frame Bridge has different categories for different occasions, like gift shopping, Christmas, or travel.

Source: Frame Bridge

You can also get creative and show your product in different use-cases to highlight the categories of your products. Article, for example, does a great job displaying how their product looks in different rooms.

Source: Article

Product images and descriptions 

Consumers can’t see and feel your products, so product photos are your opportunity to build trust and replace the in-person buying experience.

Use a combination of photos of your product to display finer details, for instance, and consumers using your product. For furniture and other items, consider using advanced features such as virtual tours and 3D imaging. They enable consumers to see themselves using your product. It’s possible to do this on your own, but if you can afford it, hire a product photographer to help capture the essence of your brand.

Furniture company American Leather does a wonderful job sharing high-quality photos of their products and people using them. They also have brief product descriptions to go along with it.

Source: American Leather

Here are a few product photography and product description tips and tricks to keep in mind:

• Shoot your product from different angles and highlight the scale. This helps consumers avoid feeling like your actual product differs in size from the image.
• Include detailed measurements for products like furniture in the description. Take furniture brand, Eloquence. Their product descriptions are short, straightforward, and answer all questions consumers might have.

Source: Eloquence

• Try to capture the finer details of your product by taking a zoomed-in picture.
• If it’s possible with your ecommerce website builder, go 3D. BigCommerce’s integration with ThreeKit lets you customize and configure your product in amazing 3D, AR, and virtual photography.
• Tell a story. Who is this product for? How can it be used? Why is it better than its competitors? This makes it easy for consumers to see why they should choose you over your competition. Take how Helix quickly talks about its mattress’ features on its website:

Source: Helix

4. Figure out shipping logistics and provide excellent customer service

The need to provide a smooth shipping experience—with fast shipping, easy returns, and low delivery charges—is indisputable today. Why? It’s one of the biggest deal-breakers for consumers. 49% of consumers cite extra costs of shipping, taxes, and fees as the primary reason for cart abandonment.

Source: Baymard Institute

But figuring out shipping, making a smooth return process, and keeping your customer in the loop throughout can be a nerve-wracking process.

You might be fulfilling orders yourself in the beginning. But as you scale, it makes more sense to hire a shipping company to be your warehouse partner. Make sure your chosen fulfillment partner has good reviews and has worked with similar companies in your industry. Determine what they charge beforehand so you can factor it in while pricing your product.

Gain consumers’ trust by elevating product reviews, highlighting quality assurance seals, and making returns and trials easy. Snowe’s transparent return policy and their detailed FAQ page is a great example.

Source: Snowe

But there’s more to customer service today than just seamless shipping.

Enter: Multichannel and omnichannel retailing.

The pandemic forced many retailers to adapt to multi-channel retailing—the practice of selling merchandise on many different sales channels.

According to a report by Global Data, retailers employing multichannel services achieved the best online channel growth rates—including many traditional retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart.

Neil Saunders, GlobalData’s lead retail analyst, said:

“Despite claims that the growth of online shopping is leading to a ‘retail apocalypse,’ the reality is that many retailers across all sectors are thriving because they are innovating with multichannel to provide a convenient shopping experience for consumers. A very significant proportion of sales that are attributed to the online channel are, in fact, multichannel sales that rely on both stores and online for success. On average, one third of “online” non-food purchases – where a customer actually transacts online – are in fact reliant on physical stores for product selection, pick up, or return.”

The data backs this up—according to a report by Gallup, while brick-and-mortar stores show a five percent YOY growth, 60 to 70% of consumers are researching products both in-store and online. So, being just offline isn’t enough anymore.

Many retailers are also starting to recognize the importance of omnichannel retail—taking multichannel up a notch.

But what is omnichannel retail exactly?

It’s a brand’s presence not just on multiple channels (e.g., e-commerce & brick-and-mortar), but a seamless integration of inventory, customer service, and sales—making the transition between channels seamless.

Do you ever log in to your Amazon app from your smartphone and resume shopping for what you earlier saw on their website? It’s a classic example of omnichannel in action. Omnichannel strategies drive an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits. Omnisend even confirmed marketers using three or more channels in any campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate than those using a single-channel campaign.

Source: Omnisend

60% of millennials expect a consistent experience from brands across channels. No wonder the global retail omnichannel commerce platform market is expected to reach $11.1 billion by 2024.

But despite the tremendous benefits of multichannel and omnichannel retail, only 73% of marketers have a strategy in place for multichannel marketing. And while 91% of retailers plan to invest in omnichannel strategy, only 12% of retailers say they have the right technology to implement it.

Source: The State of Omnichannel Retail

How can you opt for a better omnichannel approach?

• Get to know your consumers: Conduct surveys, talk to your customers 1:1, and listen to them on social media to offer personalized services and understand what your consumers truly want. For example, Serena and Lily provide personalized design advice to their consumers.

Source: Serena and Lily

72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging. Getting to know your consumers is the stepping stone to offering personalized service to your customers. Furniture store, Burrow, takes customization to the next level with their innovative configurator. Consumers can choose the size, color, height of arms and legs while shopping for their sofa.

Source: Burrow

• Offer a great mobile experience: Optimizing your site for mobile is no longer an option. US mcommerce sales will nearly double their share of total retail sales between 2020 and 2025.

Source: eMarketer

• Be where your consumers are: Don’t jump on every channel available to you. Instead, be strategic and be where your audience is.

Customer service today is beyond affordable shipping and proactive communication. People want a hassle-free experience across devices and plentiful customization options.

5. Create a comprehensive marketing strategy

You can’t afford to be a couch potato when it comes to marketing—you have to be proactive and strategic to figure out what works for your brand. Do Facebook ads make more sense for your business, or should you try content marketing? Experimentation and thorough research are your friends here.

The furniture brand Industry West, for example, ran a creative Instagram campaign that resulted in over $900,000 in online sales. They wrote an “oops” style message sharing the details to access discounted merchandise. Their post took off, and they averaged one order every five minutes. 72% of shoppers from this campaign were first-time customers.

Like Industry West, one way to market well is to share content and build an audience on the social media platform of your choice.

For example, if you’re a furniture brand, you can share design tips and advice. It’s a great way to redirect traffic to your site and convert more social media followers into consumers. You can try a healthy mix of promotional, educational, and entertaining content.

For instance, Holistic Habitat—a socially conscious decor brand—does a great job with its Instagram Reels.

Source: Instagram

Flooring company Flooret, on the other hand, creates blog content centering around design advice, customer stories, industry trends, and more.

Source: Flooret

In the end, focus on marketing authentically and bonding with your consumers. 76% of consumers would buy from you over your competitor if they feel connected to your brand.

There’s no place like home: The future for home decor brands

So, there you have it. Our comprehensive guide to how your home decor brand can sell online.

If you’re still not reaching consumers digitally, you’re leaving money on the table for your competitors.

Right now, the bridge between e-commerce and in-store is shrinking. Selling online without sacrificing the customer experience is the best bet for home decor brands looking to grow in 2022 and beyond.

The post How to Sell Home Decor Online: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

Why?

Because they’re able to base their decisions on facts and data rather than on speculation and theories.

To get the facts and data you need to make the best decisions for your business, SEMrush has all the tools you need. And, not only can SEMrush’s tools help you dive deep into your business’ data and analytics, but your competitors’ as well.

Not only can SEMrush’s tools help you dive deep into your business’ data and analytics, but your competitors’ as well.

Having the kind of data and analytics at your disposal that SEMrush can dig up can make your business decisions super powerful.

In this SEMrush review, we’re breaking down what SEMrush does and how we used it to increase our traffic by 532%. To date, it’s one of the most powerful tools or services we’ve ever used to make a big impact on our traffic and sales.

Let’s dive into what SEMrush can do for your business (and what it’s done for ours).

SEMrush Review: What SEMrush Does

SEMrush is essentially a one-stop online marketing research service.

They started as a way to help ecommerce entrepreneurs and website owners identify their competitor’s marketing strategies so they could use them for their own businesses, but over the years, SEMrush has evolved into so much more.

They’ve created many different tools to help entrepreneurs improve their marketing efforts, like:

• Keyword Research Tools
• On-Page SEO Tools
• Competitor Analysis Tools
• Content Marketing Tools
• Local SEO Tools
• Rank Tracking Tools
• Social Media Management Tools
• Link Building Tools
• Competitor SEO Analysis Tools
• Content Creation and Distribution Tools
• Content Optimization Tools
• Paid Advertising Tools
• PPC Keyword Research Tools

And so much more!

SEMrush has about 63 tools in total so we weren’t kidding when we said they’re a one-stop-shop!

And possibly one of the best things about SEMrush is that they don’t just spit out a wad of data and analytics at you — they offer strategy ideas, too. This helps users understand how to use their data and analytics and it can also help uncover any blind spots they might have overlooked.

In short, here are some of the standout things SEMrush can help you accomplish:

• Find out who your competitors are and the top competitors in your niche
• Determine the most valuable keywords your competitors are ranking for
• Learn exactly where your competitors are getting backlinks from
• Track your keywords and monitor their Google search positions
• Discover your competitor’s lucrative products to sell in your own store
• Learn exactly which keywords to use for your own product pages and blog posts

SEMrush Review: Who SEMrush is For

SEMrush is not for the new entrepreneur just starting up their first ecommerce business. It’s a bit too robust of a tool for a new business and would likely be wasted on brand new stores that are just starting to acquire traffic and customers.

Instead, it’s best suited for intermediate- or advanced-level entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their reach, boost their traffic, and get more ROI from their efforts. If you’re ready to grow your business to new heights and really want to dig in and do the dirty work when it comes to reports, analytics, data, and tracking, then SEMrush is the tool for you.

If you’re ready to grow your business to new heights and really want to dig in and do the dirty work when it comes to reports, analytics, data, and tracking, then SEMrush is the tool for you.

SEMrush is also for the entrepreneur who’s ready to get competitive in their industry and take their strategies to the next step. It’s for the entrepreneur who’s ready to get in on the game for real and the entrepreneur who’s ready to perform.

Our Results Using SEMrush for One Year

We’ve been using SEMrush here at A Better Lemonade Stand for several years now.

In particular, we were highly focused on SEO growth in 2015 and used SEMrush religiously to uncover great keywords to target. Over the course of that year, we were able to explode our readership, achieving 532% growth that year.

This set the stage for the rest of our business and was instrumental in our overall success as a business.

Why is SEMrush So Effective?

For most websites, stores, and blogs, the majority of traffic (80%) comes from a handful of pages (20%). This is a perfect example of the Pareto Principle at play.

By knowing exactly what your competitor’s top-ranking pages are, and the keywords those pages are ranking for, you can be exponentially more efficient with your time by creating and optimizing your content based on those keywords.

SEMrush’s tools help you do exactly this, so there’s less guessing you have to do, and instead you can just apply the information, data, and analytics you discover to work in your favor.

SEMrush Review: Video Walkthrough

In the video below, you’ll learn the basics of SEMrush, as well as a real example of how a smaller ecommerce brand can use the tool to uncover keywords and potentially lucrative product ideas from rival competitors.

SEMrush Review: Features & Tools

SEMrush offers a bunch of different features and services, some will be better for your business than others depending on your unique goals and objectives, but there’s sure to be a tool that can help you to improve your business no matter what your target is.

Check out the following descriptions for an overview of each tool and click on the link to learn more about it.

SEMrush SEO Tools

Keyword Research

We’ve discussed the importance of keyword research before in our Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research, so it’s no surprise that SEMrush provides tools dedicated specifically to helping you find the best high-volume and long-tail keywords for your content and website.

SEMrush provides 6 different keyword research tools:

• Keyword Overview: Get access to all necessary data of any keyword you search
• Organic Research: Analyze lists of your competitor’s keywords so you can discover new ways to win
• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from one seed keyword
• Keyword Gap: Compare any website’s keywords profile against your own to find competitive gaps
• Keyword Manager: Analyze metrics for up to 1,000 keywords to keep tabs on your goals
• Organic Traffic Insights: Integrate with your store’s Google Analytics to cross-reference your performance

Keywords are such an important part of SEO and are an essential part of building a strong web presence for ecommerce businesses and websites alike, so SEMrush’s keyword research tools are so valuable if you want to increase your traffic.

On-Page SEO

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing so make sure you’re up to date with everything by using SEMrush’s on-page SEO tools. These tools enable you to check whether you’re hitting the mark when it comes to things like content writing, link building, keyword usage, and plenty of other SEO essentials.

These three tools will ensure that you’re doing everything possible to successfully optimize your website for search engines:

• Site Audit: Fix on-site problems and improve your SEO with SEMrush’s Site Audits. With this tool, you’re able to check the health of your SEO strategy, track your SEO progress, improve security, fix mistakes, and more
• On-Page SEO Checker: Generates a list of strategies you can use to improve each webpage’s SEO
• Log File Analyzer: Discover how a Google crawler sees your web pages so you can make necessary changes to make it easier for it to navigate

Local SEO

Are you a “local” business in your area? Optimize your website using these local SEO tools so you’re more likely to show up in search results for people in your area.

• Listing Management: Get your business listed on important directories like Yelp, Facebook, Google My Business, Amazon Alexa, and TripAdvisor with just one quick and easy entry
• Position Tracking: Track your site’s place in the SERPs to ensure that you’re ranking in search results and staying there
• On-Page SEO Checker: Use this tool to analyze your competitor’s strategies and other trends in the industry to stay relevant
• Social Media Toolkit: Post and schedule content to go live on multiple different platforms from just one place

Rank Tracking

Keep an eye on how your website is performing in Google search results with these rank tracking tools:

• Position Tracking: Track your site’s place in the SERPs to ensure that you’re ranking in search results and staying there
• Sensor: Keep track of Google’s changes and updates to predict how your site’s SEO efforts may be impacted
• Ranks: Discover top-performing websites so you can compare their performance, keywords, traffic costs, and more

Link Building

Link building is an essential part of the SEO strategy and with these tools, you can discover new backlinks, audit current backlinks, create outreach campaigns to get new backlinks, and also track your overall progress.

If you want to take your SEO to new levels, start working on your backlink profile with these tools:

• Backlink Analytics: Discover and track backlinks
• Backlink Audit Tool: Monitor your backlink profile to keep it clean and working in your site’s favor
• Backlink Gap: Find new backlink opportunities by tracking competing backlink profiles
• Bulk Backlink Analysis: Analyze your competitor’s backlinks to find new opportunities
• Link Building Tool: Run outreach campaigns to get new backlinks

Competitor SEO Analysis

The hardest part about SEO is getting ahead of the competition. With these tools, you can keep a close eye on their strategies and tactics so you can find gaps or take over.

• Organic Research: Enter your competitor’s domain to get insights into their SEO strategies and tactics
• Keyword Gap: Compare any website’s keywords profile against your own to find competitive gaps
• Backlink Analytics: Discover and track backlinks
• Backlink Gap: Find new backlink opportunities by tracking competing backlink profiles
• My Reports: Pull together all of your insights in one neat and tidy PDF that you can share with your team or clients

SEMrush Content Tools

Content is king when it comes to your website; it’s how you’ll gain a lot of traffic that you can then turn into customers. SEMrush’s content tools are designed to help you create the best content for relevant keywords so you can attract people to your site like a moth to a flame.

Content Marketing

Create a super-strong content strategy that achieves your goals and gets attention with these tools:

• Topic Research: Find high-quality content topics that your audience will love
• Marketing Calendar: Manage and plan your content calendar with your team
• SEO Content Template: Get helpful recommendations to create SEO-optimized content that competes against top-rankers for your target keyword
• SEO Writing Assistant: Check your SEO and readability score to ensure that your content is on the right track
• Brand Marketing: Find the top people and platforms in your industry to distribute your content
• Post Tracking: Measure your content’s performance, or track your competitor’s content performance
• Content Audit: Check through your content easily to discover what’s performing well and what needs to be updated

Content Creation & Distribution

Use these tools specifically to help you create great content and get it out to the public:

• Topic Research: Find high-quality content topics that your audience will love
• Content Marketplace: Find unique content pieces that you can post to your site
• Social Media Poster: Share and schedule social posts and then analyze the results

Content Optimization

Make your content work for you by putting these tools to work:

• SEO Content Template: Get helpful recommendations to create SEO-optimized content that competes against top-rankers for your target keyword
• SEO Writing Assistant: Check your SEO and readability score to ensure that your content is on the right track

Content Marketing Analytics

Keep an eye on your content’s performance so you can update and adjust as needed:

• Content Audit: Check through your content easily to discover what’s performing well and what needs to be updated
• Post Tracking: Measure your content’s performance, or track your competitor’s content performance

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SEMrush Market Research Tools

If you want to be a strong competitor in your industry, you need to keep an eye on your industry. Use SEMrush’s market research tools to track and analyze the strategies your competitors are using so you can come out on top.

Competitor Analysis

Get all the dirt on your competition with these tools:

• Traffic Analytics: Compare your site’s traffic metrics against your competitors so you can make plans and rebuild
• Organic Research: Analyze lists of your competitor’s keywords so you can discover new ways to win
• Advertising Research: Improve your advertising campaigns by getting a glimpse into your competitor’s
• Brand Monitoring: Stay in-the-know with who’s mentioning you and what they’re saying. You can even keep tabs on your competitor’s mentions so you can target them for yourself and possibly find new channels for distributing your brand
• Social Media Tracker: Analyze your competitor’s social media, keep tabs on your audience’s preferences, and discover new ways to increase engagement

Market Analysis

Get a feel for the competitive landscape in your market with these tools:

• Market Explorer: Discover market size and potential, any key players, and traffic generation strategies
• Traffic Analytics: Compare your site’s traffic metrics against your competitors so you can make plans and rebuild

Paid Advertising

Discover the keywords and copy that your competitors are using in their PPC advertising campaigns:

• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from one seed keyword
• Advertising Research: Improve your advertising campaigns by getting a glimpse into your competitor’s
• Display Advertising: Analyze how other companies create successful display ads
• PLA Advertising: Analyze the performance of Google Shopping advertisers

Competitor PR Monitoring

Keep an eye on your competitor’s online mentions and social media presence:

• Brand Monitoring: Stay in-the-know of who’s mentioning you and what they’re saying. You can even keep tabs on your competitor’s mentions so you can target them for yourself and possibly find new channels for distributing your brand
• Post Tracking: Measure your content’s performance, or track your competitor’s content performance
• Social Media Tracker: Analyze your competitor’s social media, keep tabs on your audience’s preferences, and discover new ways to increase engagement

SEMrush Advertising Tools

Make sure your ads have the best chance at success by using these tools.

PPC Keyword Research

Create your ideal PPC advertising campaign with these tools:

• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from one seed keyword
• Keyword Manager: Analyze metrics for up to 1,000 keywords to keep tabs on your goals
• Keyword Gap: Compare any website’s keywords profile against your own to find competitive gaps
• PPC Keyword Tool: Create the most successful PPC campaigns by building the perfect list of keywords

Website Monetization

Monetize your audience to the best of your ability with the help of these powerful tools:

• Display Advertising: Analyze how other companies create successful display ads
• On-Page SEO Checker: Generates a list of strategies you can use to improve each webpage’s SEO
• SEO Writing Assistant: Check your SEO and readability score to ensure that your content is on the right track

SEMrush Social Media Management Tools

Social media management is a necessary part of any business these days, so use these tools to make your social media strategy as easy and effective as it can possibly be.

• Social Media Poster: Schedule and manage Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business posts from one place so you can save time and always have content prepared and ready to go
• Social Media Ads: Create, launch, and manage ads on Facebook ad platforms. See your low-performing ads so you can adjust and improve

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Pros & Cons of SEMrush

Pros:

• SEMrush offers a huge range of tools to help you better understand, track, analyze, and optimize various aspects of your website
• If you’re interested in really boosting your reach, engagement, audience, and traffic, SEMrush’s tools are powerful and helpful ways to drive improvement
• Find any gaps in your knowledge or execution to improve your strategies and get an edge
• Get all the dirt on your competition so you can overtake them
• SEMrush offers a free plan and a free 7-day trial for paid plans

Cons:

• Some of the data, suggestions, and results that SEMrush provides is based on educated estimations as some of the SEO data they examine is based on speculated information
• SEMrush is not a particularly beginner-friendly tool, it’s helpful to have some experience in SEO, SERP, SEM, PPC campaigns, ad campaigns, etc. to use it
• To access all tools and have the full function of each tool, you’ll need to sign up for a paid pricing plan

SEMrush’s Pricing

SEMrush offers a free version of their services, plus a free 7-day trial for all plans. For access to all of their tools, sign up for one of their paid plans.

What the free SEMrush account includes:

• Daily competitor or keyword research with up to 10 new queries per day
• 10 daily searches in the Keyword Magic Tool and receive 10 rows of results for each search
• Ability to create and manage one Semrush Project
• Track 10 keywords with Position Tracking
• Audit 100 pages of your site with Site Audit
• 10 SEO Idea units per month
• 2 Topic Research queries
• Schedule 1 PDF report

For up-to-date information about SEMrush’s paid plans, check out their pricing page.

Is SEMrush Worth It?

In our opinion? Yes.

SEMrush is worth it because of the wide range of tools that they offer, the dirt you can dig up on your competitor’s strategies and tactics, and based on our own major increase in traffic we experienced after using their tools.

If you really want to grow your marketing and make big moves with your SEO, content, and advertising then it’s definitely worth using SEMrush.

Conclusion

While SEMrush is not a tool for the new entrepreneur, the services they offer are powerful, robust, comprehensive, and informative.

They have every tool a seasoned entrepreneur needs to dive deep into the guts of their business whether it’s their SEO strategy, backlinks, content performance, social media engagement, brand mentions, keywords, domain authority, advertising campaign optimization, and much, much more.

If your business is weak in any or a few of these areas, then SEMrush’s tools can help you get a detailed and raw look at where your problems may lie so you can adjust your course of action, improve your strategy, and make better decisions for the future of your business.

The post SEMrush Review: How We Increased Organic Search Traffic by 532% appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

More precisely, online users spend 7.6% of their online time reading emails and 23% (a 15.4% difference) on social network activities (checking friends’ photos, updating their status, uploading pictures, talking to their friends and loved ones, and more). The most important part, however, is that more than 70% of social network users (those who actively participate in the above mentioned social network activities) are also actively shopping online. That’s 12% more than the average internet user.

So, why is this important?

These statistics make up for a very promising start—especially if you’re trying to promote your brand across multiple social channels and you’re also looking to do it right. In fact, if you nail your social media network strategy right off the bat, you’ll reap immense benefits both in the short-term and over the long haul as well (mostly in terms of visibility and revenue-wise).

Before you do all of that, however, you’ll need to come up with a long-term strategy and define your goals as clearly and realistically as possible.

Defining Social Media Targets & Setting Up Goals

Increase Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is one of the main reasons why marketers decide in favor of using social media. This is very logical because people tend to spend more time on social media than ever before, and therefore social media is one of the best places to promote your brand in front of the right target audience.

Plus, social media has opened marketers a whole new set of possibilities, mainly in regards to an increased understanding of their brand’s presence in different online environments (like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram YouTube and more).

To this extent, here are some potential metrics to consider when measuring brand awareness:

• Follower Count: How many users can your brand potentially reach?
• Social Media Post Reach: How many users do your posts reach on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis?
• Mentions, Shares & Re-Posts: How many users are discussing your brand and sharing your content?

Most major social media sites (like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter) have their native analytics, but you can always combine them with third-party tools for a more objective approach to your brand’s social media metrics.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Driving visitors from your social media channels to your brand website or blog is a very important step towards turning prospects into paying customers.

Here are some important metrics to follow to measure your online traffic:

• Social Media Traffic: The number of users that are hopping over from your social media channels to your brand’s site or blog
• Overall Traffic Share: How much of your overall online traffic comes from your social media channel traffic?
• Social Media Traffic Bounce Rate: The quality of your traffic that comes from your brand’s social media channels
• Social Media Post Clicks: How well do you communicate to your online audience about the ability to share your content via social media channels?

With all of that being said, there’s still one variable to check in regards to driving traffic to your website:

Measuring Traffic to Your Website

The easiest and most convenient way to measure traffic to your website is by using Google Analytics (Brace yourselves: We’ll be using it a lot). This very powerful tool gives you insights about everything you need to know about your website traffic; including organic traffic (traffic from organic online searches that users make, usually via Google or some other search engine like Bing and Yahoo!), social media traffic, paid traffic, and more.

To understand where all of your website visits (also known as your “traffic”) are coming from, click on “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Channels”. There, you’ll find several sources of online traffic, namely:

• Organic Search
• Direct
• Referral
• Social
• Other
• Email

The “Social” tab shows you the total number of visits from your social traffic, including new users, “Bounce Rate” (the amount at which a new visitor has clicked the “Back” button after landing on your site), “Pages at Session” (the number of pages your visitors will click, on average), and “Avg. Session Duration” (how much time your visitors will spend, on average, after landing on one of your pages).

For example, if your social media traffic is 10,000 visitors (from all of your social media channels), and your total traffic is 100,000 visitors (from all of your online channels as discussed above), then your social traffic will account for exactly 10% of your overall online traffic.

But, you can go even deeper.

If you click on the “Social tab”, then you’ll see the full data breakdown in Google Analytics from all of your social media sources. To give you an overall idea (for those new into the social media tracking game), some of these sources can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pocket, Pinterest, Google+, Quora, Reddit, and many more, depending on your social media presence.

You can use this data to further discern what works, what doesn’t, and which areas of your traffic-driving social media strategy need additional adjustments.

Generate New Leads

Lead generation is a strategy typically applied within companies with a long sales funnel—usually enterprise software companies. These companies use lead generation to warm up prospective customers and eventually lead them to buy a certain software solution.

In other words, this is defined as the “Sales Funnel”. If you have a significantly large social media presence or following (everything above 20K counts), then you can use this presence to get your potential customers to the top of your sales funnel (or introduce them to the solutions you offer).

Again, to do this, you need leads.

Now, the theory behind what constitutes a “lead” is quite broad, but that isn’t the main point here. Simply speaking, a lead is a person who has provided your brand/company with some kind of personal information about themselves—usually their name, email address, phone number or similar. Of course, you need to track these leads, and there are a couple of effective and interesting ways of doing so.

Lead Generation: Metrics

The most important metrics for tracking lead generation for your business are:

• Users’ Personal Information: Like names, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. How many leads have you collected via all of your social media channels?
• Gated Content Downloads & Participation: How many users have participated in your social media quizzes, contests, or giveaways and proceeded to download your gated content (ebook, flyers, additional information about your brand, etc.)?
• The Number of Clicks on Your Lead-Generation Content: How well do you get across your brand’s message on those posts?
• Conversion of Leads: Are those leads ready to take the next step and purchase your product or service?”

Lead Generation: Tracking

As we’ve said above, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to track your lead generation and adjust or improve your social media strategy accordingly.

For this to work, you must have a conversion goal set up first (you can set up a new goal in “Google Analytics Standard Reports” > “Admin” > “Goals” > “+Goal”). Once your conversion goal is all set up, go to “Acquisition” > “Social” > “Conversions” and select your preferred conversion goal you’re looking to measure.

The conversion report will then come up with a comprehensive list (depending on the number of your goals) about which social media channels are funneling in the most leads. You can also use some third-party analytics tools and/or plugins to measure goals according to your preference (and preferred level of detailed information as well).

And this is where it gets interesting, revenue-wise.

Grow Revenue

Growing revenue through social media is best utilized by businesses that aren’t plagued by a long and drawn-out sales process (like the enterprise software companies we’ve talked above). To this extent, one way to boost your sales is by coming up with an effective social media advertising strategy (example: Facebook ads) and working it out from there.

How?

Revenue Growth: Metrics

Here are the most important metrics to follow in regards to revenue growth:

• The Number of Sign-Ups Over the Number of Revenue: Are you noticing any correlation between the number of signups and revenue increasing? If so, is it because of your new social media strategy, or something else (Hint: if not sure, a good idea is to do A/B testing to see if the possible correlation between the number of signups and revenue increase is, in fact, the leading cause of the potential revenue growth)
• Ads Revenue: How much revenue is your social media ads strategy bringing in since going live?

Revenue Growth: Tracking

Remember Google Analytics? You can track revenue growth in GA as well, but this time you’d have to assign a dollar value to each conversion. Long story short: Assigning a dollar value basically means to link specific social media posts with your Google Analytics account; you can find this under “Goal Details” in GA.

If, on the other hand, you’re running an ecommerce site, then Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking would most likely be more appropriate for your business.

And it’s even easier for Facebook Ads: Simply use Facebook Pixel to link values with all upcoming conversions. Facebook Pixel is Facebook’s native analytics tool that operates on the basis of a code that you need to include in your website’s backend for tracking data. Or, in other words, copying several lines of code that Facebook Pixel provides and pasting it among your site’s own code.

Boost Brand Engagement

If the first reason was brand awareness, then engagement is the second top reason why social marketers use social media in recent years. In fact, proper social media interactions with your target audience are shown to improve brand perception, increase brand loyalty, and increase word of mouth recommendations as well.

Furthermore, it’s no secret that the majority of social media channels’ algorithms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) are set to prioritize posts with higher engagement on their respective audiences’ feeds.

What does this exactly mean?

From the perspective of these social platforms, boosting already popular content even more is logical because it does two main things:

• It increases the chances of other users joining in on the fun
• It decreases the chances of potential negative feedback and user dissatisfaction

Of course, this formula is simplified for the sake of clarity and time, but the main point is that engaging content gets shared more both by the users on a given social media platform and by the platform itself.

Brand Engagement: Metrics

These include:

• Likes, Comments & Shares Per Post: How many users are interacting with your social media content?
• Mentions, Replies, or Retweets: How many users are mentioning your brand, and how many users have you replied to?

Brand Engagement: Tracking

The same rules—just as we’ve talked about before with brand awareness—apply to track engagement metrics as well. You can use the social platforms’ native analytic tools, or you can opt-out and choose a third-party management tool (in accordance with your preference for detailed metrics) instead.

Build A Community

What’s better than tracking audience members, including total followers and potential fans? Well, it turns out building close communities (forums, chats, loyal brand members) can do wonders for making your business stand out. Some suggestions include building a brand-oriented Slack channel, opening up a new Basecamp, experimenting with Discord and even Facebook groups also come to mind.

The key point to remember is to differentiate between regular fans or followers and a dedicated community, mostly because the latter group has very different goals and concerns as opposed to just the regular fans. In order to see improvements, here’s a possible metric lineup to get you started.

Community Building: Metrics

There are several important metrics to track community building:

• Facebook Metrics: Including the number of posts, likes, and comments. How actively engaged are your users?
• Twitter metrics: Including the number of participants and tweets per one participant. How many of your users are involved in your Twitter campaigns, and how active are they?
• Slack metrics: Including the total number of daily users. How many users are actively participating in your Slack chats?

Community Building: Tracking

Community building is a complex process because it doesn’t involve just numbers or just names, but combines several metrics (the number of active users as well as the number of loyal followers always at-the-ready to solve a problem within your business community itself) to come up with a total number of community members and the rate at which your community grows.

Sound tricky, right?

And it is. However, there are countless third-party tools (Grytics, Hastracking, Keyhole) that make this process flow easily and without any major setbacks as it is. Most of these tools aren’t free, in fact, they can be quite expensive, but all of them offer free trials for you to test and see if it’s something you’d use long-term.

How about for those who don’t have the budget?

If you’re currently short on budget, it is entirely possible to track and record your data in a simple Excel spreadsheet! This process will depend on a number of variables, including your hardware configuration, operating system, the platform you’re using, and more, but it will eventually help you better understand the data behind your community’s tracking strategy. The only downside of this is that manual tracking can become somewhat tedious after a certain amount of time, so do make sure that you’re also allocating your budget to purchase tools to ease the job in the long run.

Provide Effective Social Customer Service

Having a good social customer service (or good customer service on your social media platforms) can help with three main things:

• Increasing revenue
• Improving visitor & customer satisfaction
• Optimizing retention

However, only one in five brand owners uses social media to provide customer support for their users—meaning there’s lots of room for improvement as it is.

Customer Service: Metrics

Some metrics to be on the lookout here include:

• Total Number of Support Queries: Does your business need a social media customer support strategy?
• Response Time: How fast are your social media representatives replying to your customers?
• Customer Satisfaction: Are your customers satisfied—and if yes, how much—with your social media customer service?

Now that that’s out of the way, the next thing you’ll need to do is measure the effectiveness of your customer support service.

Customer Service: Measuring Effectiveness

Measuring social media customer support effectiveness can be approached depending on two main variables:

• If you have a low number of requests/tickets
• If you have a high number of requests/tickets

If you have a low volume of customer support inquiries, you can manually track each request and its corresponding response time.

If you have a high volume of customer support inquiries, you can use one of the many social media customer service tools like Help Scout instead to be more efficient in both your response time and the quality of your social media customer service.

Increase Press Mentions

While it’s true that the recent so-called resurgence of social media channels has allowed companies to take full ownership of their news, the press is and can still be a viable option to spread the word about your brand.

Why is this important?

Well for one, this makes it easier to build relationships with credible journalists, which in turn makes your brand stand out even more (especially when those journalists have a positive reputation and an ironclad reporting integrity). Plus, it also helps your brand (through mentions, backlinks, and other important traffic measures) to become the go-to resource for information in your respective industry.

Which inevitably leads us to want to measure our potential press mentions:

Press Mentions: Metrics

To measure your PR success, you’d need to take a closer look at the following metrics:

• Potential Reach: How many potential buyers did your PR campaign reach through your social media channels?
• Mentions and Shares: How many users are mentioning, sharing, and talking about your PR articles through your social media channels?
• Influencers: How many influential, either journalists or other types of figures, are talking about and sharing your articles? Do they have a reasonably large following?
• Outreach: How many users are asking your company industry-relevant questions? How many journalists are reaching out to your company through your social media channels?

Of course, metrics and tracking your PR success go hand-in-hand.

Press Mentions: Tracking

If you’re new to the game, you can manually track all of your social media PR mentions by yourself (or your team). When it becomes increasingly hard to keep track of the entirety of your PR campaign, it means that your brand is being highly recognized. But, it’s also a sign to reach out to some quality third-party tool for help.

Usually (and generally speaking), these tools will have some or all of the following features:

• Listing the keywords you want to track
• Setting up priority pages (pages that you want to be notified when someone mentions or shares them on social media)
• Selecting the social media platforms where you want the tool to track your page mentions (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc.)

Depending on the tool you’ use, there will be some different features, but the concepts generally remain the same across multiple third-party tools.

Use Social Listening to Your Advantage

Social media has brought brands and service-users/customers closer together and now it’s much easier for customers to provide feedback to their favorite brands in a matter of minutes. By “hunting” and replying to these posts, mentions, or comments, your customers will feel like they’re having a two-way communication with your company (which builds integrity and adds social proof).

Social Listening: Metrics

As per the usual, here are the most important metrics to follow:

• Customer Conversations: How many conversations did you have (or are you having) with your users on your social media channels?
• Social Media Suggestions and/or Feedback: How many suggestions (and more importantly—are they quality suggestions?) are your users are sending you through your social media channels?
• Accepted Suggestions: How many of those suggestions have you accepted for future improvement of your product and/or service?

Social Listening: Tracking

At this point, it may sound like we’re repeating ourselves, but tracking your social listening heavily depends on which social media platform is your main target.

For example, if you’re trying to get “to the crux of things” on Twitter, then TweetDeck is an excellent, free tool to conduct a proper social listening tracking. All you need to do is set up the proper keyword searches and the software will automatically track the keywords after which you can readily respond with a tweet to your customers.

Additionally, since most social listening tools will allow keyword tracking (even if your users aren’t using the “@” handle), you can go the extra mile and surprise your customers when they forget to tag you in their tweets.

Okay, so now that we’ve come up with an effective long-term social media strategy, and we’ve also managed to define our social media goals as clearly and realistically as possible, what should our next course of action be?

How to Increase Social Media Sales

Having all these strategies (or even just one of them) firmly in place is not enough to increase your revenue. Doubling down on these strategies and taking immediate action is what will. To this extent:

Be Where Your Customers “Hover”

The first rule that any social media marketer should follow is to use the social media platform your audience uses.

How to go about it?

First, take an in-depth look at your target demographic: Is it new moms who want to buy your special baby milk formula? Or maybe law students who need help with their 5,000+ word essays about international law? Of course, you can also choose to be on each social media platform in existence, but keep in mind that spreading your assets far too thin and far too broadly can be time-consuming, and may even do more harm than good.

Remember that the most popular social media platforms are dominated by the 18-29 age group—which tells us everything about their age, but nothing about their buying habits. To find exactly where your audience (and potential buyers) are you need more than a lending hand. Remember the resource we mentioned above: Keyhole?

Keyhole is the perfect tool for discovering where your target audience mingles. The way it works is you pick a popular hashtag that your competitors use for their strategies and campaigns, and then proceed to make a search with Keyhole.

Then, scrolling down will lead you to a section named “Top Sites”. This metric provides a chart about which top domains have used a certain hashtag the most. It will also give you a general idea of where your target audience is most active.

It goes without saying, but the right social media platform for your business will give you a greater chance of accomplishing your goals. Plus, if you can reach your audience faster and with as little friction as possible, then your chances of actually doing sales and increasing your revenue will improve dramatically as well.

Use Social Media Influencers to Your Advantage

We’ve briefly touched upon social media influencers when we talked about press mentions above. Now we’re expanding upon what we already know.

As a social media marketer, you may have heard about a recently coined up strategy called “Influencer Marketing”. In layman’s terms, influencer marketing simply means to promote a product or a service via someone who has a significant social media following (and influence—hence the term) on either of the handfuls of most popular social media platforms.

Let’s take a look at a recent study by Twitter and Annalect regarding influencer marketing.

Basically, the study confirmed what every social marketer already knew: Consumers are inclined to trust influencers more than random marketers (in fact, the trust they put into social media influencers is equal to the trust consumers have in their closest friends!) which speaks volumes about the effectiveness of this social media marketing strategy.

What’s more, almost 40% of Twitter users felt compelled to buy a product/service after they’ve seen it on an influencer’s feed or in a tweet. In some cases, the return on investment (ROI) after an influencer promoted a product became as high as 600% (albeit, the norm is maybe half that). Either way, it’s really logical if you think about it: If consumers trust influencers just like they trust their closest friends, and a friend comes up to you and enthusiastically suggests a product for you to buy, would you buy that product?

However, getting in touch with influencers without breaking the bank is tougher than it seems. Do we have the magical formula on how to get in touch with one? No, but we can offer a couple of useful tips:

• Appeal to the core interests of your preferred social media influencer without being too aggressive in your intentions. Be honest about your product or service.
• Craft a compelling message explaining why your product or service would be ideal for the influencer’s followers. If you’re contacting their marketing team, try to negotiate a free or a discounted mention in exchange for free products

Of course, these are just general rules which you can use to develop your own unique strategy.

Transform Loyal Customers into Brand Lobbyists

Promoting your brand with influencers is great, but sometimes this strategy can backfire if your product is not congruent (does not fall in line) with the influencer’s ideals. If this ends up being the case, but you’re still eager on promoting your product with real people, then the solution is closer than what you’d think.

It’s all about using your real customers as brand advocates (enticing them to promote your product by way of offering free giveaways, coupons, discounts, and all sorts of free “goodies”).

One way to go about this is to collect relevant keywords and other brand-related searches (hashtags, for instance) on social media. This will help you to locate the most prominent “accidental advocates” of your brand and make it official. Upgrade these kinds of customers into your brand’s official lobbyists.

Share User-Made Content

Consumers are a lot smarter than what some marketers (and social media market specialists) give them credit for. Before parting with their hard-earned money online for an item or service, they tend to read several different reviews (possibly from several different sources) to see if the brand is trustworthy. These reviews ease the anxiety every consumer feels when thinking about buying a product from a brand they don’t know (or investing in a service they’re not familiar with).

In fact, when these reviews come from other consumers just like them, they feel the kind of honesty that funnels them into buying the product. And when you come to think of it, it’s all of us who do this and do it because of one simple reason—we’re hardwired to look out for social proof.

We’ve mentioned social proof before, but what does it exactly mean?

Stripped down to basics, social proof essentially means other consumers have tried and recommend the product, and since they’re just regular consumers with no bias towards the product, they’re likely to give an honest and fair review. This makes their opinion matter the most to other consumers, and it makes their stamp of approval mean so much more than a business or advertiser’s word. According to most social media marketing experts, up to 70% of USA-based consumers will be more inclined to buy products after reading positive (or relatable) content about those products generated from other users, which is what makes social proof so powerful.

Another effective way to increase revenue through social media is by encouraging your customers to post their opinions about your products (written form, photos, and even positive memes) online. Plus, you can even go one step further and share these user-generated opinions across all of your relevant social media channels. This is a foolproof way of adding additional credibility and social proof to your brand whenever potential customers start poking around your social media channels.

Create Highly Engaging Content to Educate & Sell

By the looks of this title, creating engaging content sounds easier said than done (then again, if it was easy—everyone would do it!). This is where hiring creative professionals (large creative agencies are usually not recommended because they have a long-winded process of approving a marketing campaign that ends up being a patchwork of several different ideas stuffed into one message) comes into play. Or, if you feel like you’re up for the task, you can make engaging content in-house as well by using pre-made social media templates that services such as Placeit offer.

Ideally, whether hiring creative professionals or getting down in the trenches all by yourself, you should aim to produce quality guides and engaging how-to content.

The general idea here is to entice your prospects to try your product, and therefore naturally nudge them further down the funnel which gives you a higher chance of closing the deal and making a sale.

Invest in Social Media Advertising

It’s no secret that the most popular social media platforms have millions of active users (Facebook even goes as far as having 1 billion users at the time of writing this piece!). But, even if you come up with the most effective strategy and pick the perfect platform to reach your target audience, your efforts could potentially end up not as effective because none of those users have heard about your brand before. To develop a head start, go ahead and allocate some of your social marketing budget into social media advertising, but make sure you’re reaching the right type of audience as discussed in the “Increasing Brand Awareness” section of this article. The last thing you’d want to do is misfire towards people who aren’t interested in your brand.

Nowadays, most social media platforms make it easy for enterprises to advertise locally, having the option to either create ads or promote or boost content as well. We may sound like we’re repeating ourselves often, but this is because these are some of the most important points to remember (also, repetition is the mother of skill!). So, creating ads will ensure a higher visibility for your brand amongst a relevant audience (potential buyers). This, in turn, will further improve your chances of increasing revenue from social media sales.

Instagram
Take Instagram for example. On it, you can choose to advertise via their popular “Instagram Stories” feature on top of their regular advertising models. Opting for Instagram stories can help drive brand awareness, which is one of the main predictors of ad recall and ultimately—revenue and sales.

Facebook
Facebook advertising offers similar models to raise brand awareness, increase conversions, and close sales as well. The good thing with Facebook advertising is the unique offer of creating a video advert (remember, all people are visual creatures first and foremost), which has a proven three times higher purchase rates than regular text ads. For help creating beautiful Facebook ads on a budget, check out our article on the Top 10 Facebook Post Templates for Ecommerce Businesses.

Twitter & LinkedIn
Similar to Instagram and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer the same ads model, including sponsored or promoted posts and InMail (LinkedIn) to reach the right target audience each and every time one of your campaigns goes live.

The best thing about these models is the ability to customize your ads to display a product that a user has recently scrolled through on your website. This has the effect of potentially reminding the customer of what they were looking for before closing your page, which further entices them to follow through with a purchase. This is known in the marketing industry as “retargeting” and we discussed how to operate a retargeting strategy in our Facebook Retargeting Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Use The Power of Rich Pins & Buyable Pins on Pinterest

Pinterest is an entire market on its own, and this is one of the main reasons why it’s getting a dedicated chapter (that and the fact that it’s predominantly a visually oriented search engine). According to Shopify, the sales made from ads pins on Pinterest have a $50 higher average order value as compared to the other social media platforms. If you’re also running a Shopify store, there’s good news on that front as well: Pinterest accounts form the second-most online traffic from all social media sources to Shopify stores.

If you plan to market your products/services through Pinterest marketing (and really, there isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t do it), it’s a wise move to simplify the purchase funnel by utilizing what’s called Rich Pins and Buyable Pins. We covered these in detail in our Pinterest Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses: Drive Traffic with Pinterest article, but we’ll recap them here.

Rich Pins
Rich pins are pins that feature more information about a certain product directly on top of a regular pin. These pins come in four distinctive types:

• App
• Product
• Recipe
• Article

App pins feature an install button so customers can easily download your app whilst still staying on Pinterest for additional shopping from your store. There is only one caveat though: currently, app pins are only compatible with iOS.

Product pins are designed to make the shopping process as easy and intuitive as possible. They feature pricing (including real-time change), availability, and the location of buying a certain product.

Recipe pins contain all the ingredients a food connoisseur and recipe warrior would want from a pin. These include ingredients, cooking time, and serving size.

Article pins help users save stories that are most important to them. These pins feature headlines, author bios, and article excerpts.

Buyable Pins
Buyable pins are perfect for ecommerce use since they allow your customers to buy your products without leaving your Pinterest shop. These types of pins can be found in search results, related pins, and on your enterprise profile as well.

The other great thing about Buyable Pins is their functionality; they work seamlessly across both mobile and desktop platforms. This is excellent from a business owner’s perspective since users can buy your products without changing several different platforms (which also carries the risk of losing the sale or your customers getting stuck somewhere in the sales funnel).

To avoid the trouble of losing your customers to avoidable factors, buyable pins feature the “Add To Bag” button, where customers can add their shipping and payment information without having to make a switch to another platform. This process is very effective and allows for increased conversions right there and then.

Additionally, Pinterest leaves it up to you to handle shipping and customer service (if a purchase is made through a Buyable Pin), but more importantly, the platform doesn’t take a cut of your sales.

Finally, Buyable Pins can be promoted to make it easier for potential users to find your products. Think of this as a Pinterest’s equivalent to social media advertising of Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Promote Your Brand Through a Story

If your brand doesn’t have a narrative behind it, then consider building a story behind it to strengthen the relationship between your company and your prospective (as well as existing) customers.

Why?

First of all, humanity is hardwired to love a good story. Ever since the dawn of epics such as The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, people have gathered around bonfires to tell, listen, and enjoy a good story.

How does this help modern businesses to increase revenue and sales?

It’s simple: Consider social media as the metaphorical “bonfires” where people now gather to tell and listen to stories. And why do they gather? Because they want to be emotionally charged and feel better long after they’ve logged out from their respective social media accounts. The major social platforms use the habit-creating dopamine rush of unopened messages to create a feedback loop so that users will spend more time on their platform.

So, you have your bonfire (social media platform), you have your audience (people who want to hear a good story), and you have your storyteller (in this case, the storyteller is you, your company, or your digital marketing team) all lined up and it’s really up to you how you’ll go about creating a narrative behind your brand.

Prioritize Quality Over Quantity

This should be obvious to most digital marketers, but sorting through mediocre and sub-par content to reach highly engaging and informative content is a recurring problem most social media users have to handle on their own. Or, in other words: There is a big discrepancy between quality content and run-of-the-mill texts that add little to no value in the digital world.

This is why it’s very important to keep high standards content-wise; not at the peril of neglecting your social media accounts but at a steady pace that both you and your customers can handle. Plus, remember how we’ve talked about people being visual creatures first and foremost (which is part of why Pinterest experienced a growth-explosion in recent years)? Always make sure to post high-quality images to serve as leverage for your engaging content.

Follow Content Trends

Trends exist for a purpose: To be followed. Now, it’s possible to invent a new trend, but it usually takes a lot of time, resources, skill, and luck to pull it off properly. However, this is where you jump on whatever current fad is popular on social media and seize the opportunity while the trend is still hot.

Use the “Obvious” Trigger

Why be indirect when you can generate sales with a direct trigger? Large companies with enormous social media followings tend to use these triggers, and to great effect, we might add. Using some, or all, of these triggers can lead to an obvious sale:

• “Buy now!”
• “Get started!”
• “Get yours now!”

All of these are direct triggers, and they work best with a large social media audience. And it’s only logical: If you tell 5,000 people to buy something, and you have the proven authority to do so (including social proof), then chances are you’ll get decent sales. It’s an obvious formula that not enough digital marketers use, so think about crafting several campaigns by using direct buying triggers (like the ones above).

For small business owners, this can be tricky as they tend to be “assimilated” into the vast ocean that is social media presence. Plus, small businesses are usually run by a single person (or a handful of people) at any given time, so using direct triggers here would be less-than-ideal.

With all of that being said, how do you succeed in social media marketing if you’re a small business owner?

Use Conventional Tactics in Unconventional Ways

Social media can create a big buzz both for companies and individuals alike. Social media can also narrow down your business communication to a particular niche. To this extent, social media users want to browse for items/products they might like, but not necessarily buy.

In fact, as much as 56% of shoppers aren’t ready to make a final decision, but instead, they want to save their potential purchase for later. This shopper behavior is even more prevalent in recent years. If this is the case with your business—it’s time to use your social media channels to introduce your products to the customer.

Generate Buzz

Sales appear less chance-driven if there’s a new product to sell to customers. What this basically means is new products tend to generate more buzz than what’s already out there, so customers will like these new products more and will tend to gravitate towards buying them more as well. This is exactly how you eliminate chance. Each sale will become a deliberate effort, even though it may seem like a chance or a sudden stroke of luck for the customer (where instead your strategy is what did all the heavy lifting).

Be Consistent With What You’re Selling

Or in other words: You can’t tweet about ice-cream if you’re selling video games. Well technically you can, but those tweets won’t generate any revenue for you.

The key to achieving this is to start early in the process of a new product or service. Use tried-and-true titles to grab your customers’ attention:

• We are releasing a brand-new downloadable content early next week!
• Only next week, all sales are off by 50%!

Meanwhile, try to create scarcity in your offer:

• Enter our giveaway for a chance to win one of the 210 exclusive beta keys for our latest product!

You can use everything we’ve talked so far to create recurring offers and repeat them (usually your most profitable offers) as much as you’d like.

The Untapped Power of Re-Sharing Your Posts

Why don’t the majority of small business owners re-share their posts? Currently, there is no scientific data on this yet, so we’re going to go with the two most probable reasons:

• They’re Busy: Most business owners have thousands of other things to consider, so re-sharing what they’ve already deemed a job well done is the last thing on their minds
• The Fear of Spamming: Earlier, when social media wasn’t as big as it is now, sharing the same thing multiple times was considered lazy and borderline spammy

This problem, however, is easily solvable: You should become more organized about re-sharing your posts or use a tool like Buffer to pre-schedule your business’ social shares.

On the other hand, fear of spamming is a more legitimate concern which is also harder to overcome. The solution, of course, is to adopt a wider stance and realize that social networks in recent years are not the same as they were ten years ago. Nowadays, social media users have very busy social feeds. On top of that, the algorithms these social sites employ also work, in a sense, “against” small businesses and small business owners (on Facebook, posts by business pages are seen by as little as 6% of the total number of the pages’ followers).

This makes it super hard for a single post to be seen by your followers, which is exactly where we have to pull off a change of tactics.

Schedule Multiple Shares

Sharing your content multiple times works, but make sure you’re not over-sharing your content and becoming spammy. To give you an overall idea, scheduling your best content to be shared at least 5 times is the proper way to go (less than that, and the chances of your post to be seen by the prospective buyers will decrease; more than that, and you’re pushing your luck with both users and page algorithms as well).

However, you can never really predict which post will become the most popular post amongst your followers. This is precisely why you’d have to share your most popular posts 5 times at most.

Come Up With a Sound Multiple Share Strategy

The biggest impediment to pushing out multiple shares is the brain. As soon as you write, edit, publish and share a given post, your memory considers this as having completed a task (which it has, but not if you want to schedule 4 more shares of the same post). To override this, you can use calendars (Google Calendar comes to mind) to make reminders over the next several months or so “nudging” you to re-share your content.

Another, more sophisticated way of doing this is by using automated publishing tools. Most of these tools are very powerful and have a pre-scheduling option to allow multiple shares on several of the most popular social networks. If you opt for a sharing tool featuring a calendar like Buffer or MissingLettr, then all you’d have to do is click on a given date and time to create your post. The post will then automatically be shared on the pre-set date and time which you chose.

Thirdly, you can also introduce variation in the way of sharing and re-sharing your posts (this is also useful if you want to avoid any fears of becoming too spammy). What do we mean by this?

If you think about it, most social media content shares start with the title of the post. And this is exactly how your first share should lead. After that, you can plan your additional shares by pulling out useful information from the body of the post. So, instead of sharing your post 5 times where it leads with the same title, you could share a tip or statistic from deeper within the post itself.

This tactic prevents any potential spamming issues and it also allows for casting a wider net so that your specific tip will grab someone’s attention where the title didn’t.

Now, we’ve already stated to re-share your content 5 times at most, but is this true for all social media platforms?

The “social flow” of Twitter, for example, tends to move very quickly. The average “shelf life” of a single tweet clocks in at 24 minutes. This is an excellent opportunity to break the golden rule and get away with more than 5 re-shares. However, if you’re re-sharing within a short time-frame, then make sure to rewrite your post since Twitter will reject the same tweets sent too closely from one another.

Finally, if you’re into big data and want to know everything that goes on behind the scenes, you can always tag your links. How? By using the Google URL Builder tool to make a unique URL for each individual share and each distinctive social platform as well. Then, just go to “Campaigns” in your Google Analytics dashboard to see how each individual share performs traffic-wise.

Creating High-Quality Social Media Images

We briefly touched upon this topic when we talked about prioritizing quality over quantity, and now it’s time to expand on it even more. To this extent, more than 70% of social media users find high-quality images at least twice as effective at grabbing their attention as opposed to text-content alone. In fact, as social media users become more discerning in recent years, this 70% rule excludes generic stock images and low-quality images as well.

If you’re not a designer (and let’s face it, most entrepreneurs aren’t), then it’s best to either:

• Hire a visual designer from sites like Dribbble, Upwork or Fivver
• Use some of the dozens of quality third-party tools to source photos for your articles such as the ones we mention in our 200+ Graphic Design Resources article

Strapped for ideas still? Here are some suggestions.

Create Themed Images

Themed images are defined as a series of images that fall within a specific design pattern (for example: black & white, grayscale, art deco, pop art, etc.). This design pattern can greatly vary between different companies, but it’s always recognizable, predictable (“predictable” as in, similar to what’s already proven that people like) and 100% reliable for a specific company.

So, coming up with your own themed images style is critical for the success of your social media advertising, sharing included. Themed images are absolutely crucial for promoting brand recognition and developing a consistent brand presence as well.

Bottom line, if you want to create images, keep things such as your company’s color, typeface (font), and company’s voice consistent across all media platforms. Tools like our Ecommerce Branding Guide can help you develop all these brand assets for your business.

Hire a Visual Designer

Third-party image platforms (Canva comes to mind) make it easy to create your own infographics, graphics or visual content. However, creating and manipulating images is a very time-consuming task for people who don’t have sufficient skills and don’t do it frequently. Here’s where hiring a visual designer is the wisest move to make.

A designer can help you in multiple ways. For instance, by opting to hire one, you’ll immediately get access to a large batch of high-quality images that would otherwise be out of reach (if, instead, you’re doing the design on your own volition). In turn, this will free up a valuable chunk of time which can then be applied to growing your business and better macro-management of your social media channels.

Not sure where visual designers mingle? You can use freelance talent platforms such as Dribbble, Guru, Upwork, and Toptal, hire an agency or opt for solo freelancers (not bound by platforms) instead.

But saving time is much more than just hiring outside talent.

Create a Consistent Image Format

Regardless, if you choose to make the images on your own or hire a designer to do it in your stead, one big thing you should be careful about is creating a standard image format that you can use down the road. Some tend to call this format an “image set”, but this theory is of little help here. What’s important in regards to image standards is to always have:

• Featured image size for each social platform
• Inset image formula for an easy share on all social platforms

What do these mean? Basically, the main thing to remember is to save image size presets to ensure a streamlined operation when it’s time to share your new content to your subscribers. Here’s which sizes work best for all major social platforms:

• Facebook: 170px x 170px, but some industry experts recommend uploading images at least twice that resolution to ensure all quality standards are met
• Instagram: 1080px x 1080px
• Pinterest: Pins should be 736px x 1104px, while Board Covers are 736px x 736px
• LinkedIn: 1200px x 628px

Don’t Forget About Alt Text

Alt-text is one of the most overlooked variables among social media marketers in recent years where, in fact, alt text—however cliché it may sound—can make or break your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So, how to define alt text?

In simple language, alt text is an abbreviation of alternative text, and it basically refers to the text behind a given image on your site. If, for example, your image doesn’t load (for one reason or another), alt text is there to give the reader an overall representation of what the image represents, in text form. But alt text is also used to allow people with vision disabilities to “read” the image or have the image read it to them via screen readers.

If your site is WordPress-powered or powered by most ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, then you won’t (or you don’t need to) deal with code to attach alt-text to your images. You can easily fill, update, or change your alt text whenever you upload an image in your media library.

What’s more, you can also use alt text to include keywords so that search engines can find your content more easily on the web.

The interesting thing with alt text is that, unlike meta descriptions or tags, alt text doesn’t have a maximum proposed length. If you’re unsure how to include alt text in your images, remember to always include your keywords here and you’ll be good to go. However, it’s also important to add alt text to every image on your site and to include all the relevant information such as full product names, product IDs, head as well as and long-tail keywords.

To Recap:

• Always include your relevant keywords in alt text on ALL images on your site
• Channel these rules in the Featured Image section, where search engines (usually Google) scrape data from these images to later show in knowledge graph SERPs

Uploading the Right Social Media Image Format

Most digital marketers don’t realize this, but the type of image file that you upload on your site has an impact on image quality! Many people tend to upload JPEG file types almost automatically, but there may be another option for this.

Generally, there are three major image types for internet use, which we discuss in detail in our Optimizing Images for Web article:

• JPEG: Commonly used for photographs where people, places, and objects are featured
• PNG: Best used for logos, text designs, and graphics. Additionally, PNGs are also recommended for images with a transparent background, such as a logo for a website
• GIF: Animated (moving) images which are commonly used to express an emotion, tell a joke or insert a meme

If you’re still in the dark about which format to use for your website, you essentially have to remember two main rules: Use JPEGs for standard photos, and use PNGs for any of the custom graphics you make.

Besides file types, you’ll also need to pay attention to your image’s dimensions as well. Avoid uploading enormous files (keep it down to less than 2MB per image), because they tend to affect page speed, SEO, and users will slower internet connections/older computers won’t be able to reach to your content as fast and consequently, may exit away from your site.

How to do all of this?

Many web hosting/publishing platforms (WordPress included) offer built-in options for resizing and tweaking images. If you’re still not satisfied with the results, you can always use professional photo editing software like Photoshop to resize your images according to the guidelines we put above.

And what about using stock photos for your business?

Be Careful With Stock Photos

Sometimes, using stock photos is necessary if you’re in a hurry or just want to get the job done. However, too many stock photos in your social media strategy can unequivocally make your website—and content—look bland and boring. If for some reason you absolutely have to use stock photos, then it’s best to keep the following practices in mind:

• Search for High-Quality Options: Most stock photos come from professional platforms, but that doesn’t mean that they’re always going to have the highest quality (this is because these platforms utilize freelance photographers who then sell them images in bulk). As you’re searching for images to use in your social media strategy to increase sales and revenue, look for pictures that are crisp, clear, and have the right tone (for example, comedic if you’re running a comedy site, euphoric if you’re a sales-oriented business, etc.) as well. Plus, if there are people in your stock photos, make sure that they reflect your target audience and the topic in the photographs are relevant to your content.
• White Space is a Must: Another general rule of thumb is to look for photos with enough white space on them. Why? Because you need additional text to advertise a product, convey your brand’s message, or come up with a witty remark to increase visibility and ultimately make a sale.
• Look out for Attribution Rules: Most stock photos don’t require any attribution for use. However, some do. By thoroughly understanding attribution and copyright rules, you can avoid some unforeseen legal issues which can impair your business from seemingly out of nowhere. If you get lost in the legalities of fair use, there’s always the option to hire a legal person to do the work in your stead.

Become A “Visual” Storyteller

While considered important, most small business owners think of website images as a mere afterthought in the larger scheme of their social media strategy. Unfortunately, this is the wrong approach to have. What you need to do instead is create a unique visual content that stands out from the competition and immediately catches the eye of prospective customers.

This may sound like a truism (a statement that is always true), but that doesn’t make it any less important than, say, having a well-researched and engaging piece.

Think of it this way: Instead of following the herd and making your pictures as generic as possible, you’ll need to invest the time (or hire a team) to grow a truly eye-popping visual strategy. Then, have all of your new images neatly “fall” within this social media strategy—with each image you publish being the best one yet. Sure, it takes extra effort to pull this off, but it’s well worth it, in the long run, both brand awareness, and revenue-wise.

Conclusion

So to recap, we’ve seen that a firm social media strategy in place is crucial if you want to increase sales for your business. In fact, with the social platform landscape moving ever-so-quickly, having these goals defined is not only crucial—but it’s absolutely necessary for every business owner.

These goals include:

• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Driving Traffic to Your Website
• Generating New Leads
• Growing Revenue
• Boosting Brand Engagement
• Building a Community
• Providing Effective Social Customer Service
• Increasing Press Mentions
• Using Social Listening to Your Advantage

A business can have either of these goals, one, or all, but the general rule says to narrow down on two-three and build your social media strategy based on these few goals in mind.

Additionally, we’ve also gone through some of the most popular (and effective) ways on how to drive sales by utilizing the several major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).

These ways are as follows:

• Be Where Your Customers Are
• Use Social Media Influencers To Mention Your Products
• Transform Loyal Customers Into Brand Lobbyists
• Share User-Made Content
• Create Highly Engaging Content to Educate and Sell
• Invest in Social Media Advertising
• Use The Power of Rich Pins and Buyable Pins On Pinterest
• Promote Your Brand through a Story
• Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
• Follow Content Trends
• Use Obvious Triggers Like “Buy”
• Use Conventional Tactics in Unconventional Ways
• Re-Share Your Posts
• Use High-Quality Social-Friendly Images

As you may notice, all of these ways mainly involve winning the trust of your target audience via other people, both influencers and customers alike. But some of them are also reflective of your skills as a social media marketer and your abilities to delegate tasks cleanly, efficiently, and effectively (and of course, within budget).

Plus, you’ll also have to ensure that your brand gets the desired visibility out of your social media campaigns in order to reach the right audience (it gets somewhat repetitive by this point, but this is mainly to increase revenue and stimulate sales). Don’t forget to craft compelling content to entice your readers to buy your products and services and turn them into recurring and loyal customers.

Finally, the main objective of these social media strategies is to reduce friction and minimize any unnecessary steps that could prevent interested prospects from making a purchase.

And, going forward, that’s a very clear rule to adhere to.

The post Social Commerce: How to Drive Social Media Sales in 2021 appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

What’s more, it’s easy. Almost anyone can open an online store and begin selling products.

Even if you start with a solid competitive advantage, the world of ecommerce changes all the time. You need to keep an eye out for changes in the competitive landscape if you want to stay successful.

The good news?

You can use competitive intelligence software to automate your competitor research workflow and make things easier for yourself.

Competitive intelligence tools like Visualping’s API can alert you any time your competitor’s website changes so you can stay on top of marketing trends and focus on optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Creating a Competitive Edge in Ecommerce
• Competitive Intelligence Software 101
• Monitor Your Competitor’s Website With Visualping
• Monitor Competitor Social Media With Visualping
• Other Ways To Use Visualping’s Competitive Intelligence Software
• Final Thoughts: How To Use Visualping’s Competitive Intelligence Software

Creating a Competitive Edge in Ecommerce

Ecommerce is an incredibly competitive industry, whether you’re selling to businesses or consumers. Since barriers to entry are relatively low, it’s easy for new competition to arise.

Let’s look at how you can establish and maintain a competitive advantage for your ecommerce business.

Create a Unique Selling Proposition

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is an essential part of your marketing strategy. The USP statement describes how you deliver value to your customers and how your brand differs from your competitors.

In other words, you need to know what makes your brand unique.

For example, plenty of brands sell cars. But BMW sells “The Ultimate Driving Machine” while Subaru sells adventure and reliability.

Ecommerce is a saturated field, so you have to figure out what makes you different and communicate that in your digital marketing strategy.

Focus on Customer Experience

Unlike a traditional customer who meets you face-to-face and tries out the product you are offering, an ecommerce customer makes up their opinion based only on customer experience — how easy it is to search, select, and pay for your products.

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 75% of customers are willing to spend more with companies that offer a good user experience, and 50% of customers will switch to another brand after just one bad experience.

If you want to stand out from the competition, customer experience is an excellent place to focus. It’s simple: Make your purchase process fast and easy. Customers will love it and keep coming back.

Leverage Social Media

As an ecommerce business owner, your website is your most valuable sales and marketing channel. However, that shouldn’t make you overlook the importance of social media.

A whopping 91% of people who follow a brand on social media visit the brand’s website, 89% of them will make a purchase, and 85% will recommend the brand to a friend or family member.

Building a social media following helps increase your website traffic and lets you engage with your customers outside the point-of-sale. If your competitors are active on social media, you can’t afford to ignore it.

Competitive Intelligence Research

Competitive intelligence research is the process of collecting and analyzing information about your business competitors. Companies use competitive intelligence to influence strategic decisions, especially for creating and maintaining a competitive advantage.

While you can collect competitive intelligence manually, it’s time-consuming and error-prone. We recommend using a competitive intelligence software or program instead.

An effective competitive intelligence program pulls information from various primary and secondary data sources. In other words, it tracks your competition across multiple channels such as websites, social media, and search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can’t set yourself apart from the competition if you don’t know their strengths and weaknesses as well as you know your own. Competitive intelligence software does that and helps you differentiate your brand.

Competitive Intelligence Software 101

Gathering and analyzing competitive intelligence research can be an uphill task. You have to track multiple channels for each competitor and analyze updates to see what they changed.

Competitive intelligence software uses technology to make your research easier. It can automatically monitor your competitors, help you analyze the data, and alert you of relevant changes.

Using the data collected by competitive intelligence software, ecommerce business owners and marketers can perform a competitive analysis and identify benchmark goals for their industry.

Visualping’s Competitive Intelligence Software

Visualping is a competitor intelligence software solution that lets you monitor your competitors’ websites, social media accounts, and search engine rankings. It’s a part of Google’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning accelerator for startups.

Visualping serves several purposes, including personal website monitoring, competitive intelligence gathering, regulatory compliance (tracking changes in relevant laws), and quality assurance.

Marketers using Visualping for competitive monitoring can automatically receive real-time change alerts from competitor websites.

Furthermore, Visualping is more than just a competitive insights research tool. It can also inform your website visitors when you make a relevant change — such as a price reduction, scholarship opening, proposal request, or regulatory update — that you want them to see.

Keep reading to learn how to use Visualping for competitive intelligence research that will help you keep your competitive advantage.

Monitor Your Competitor’s Website With Visualping

Tracking changes to your competitor’s website is an essential part of competitor analysis. With Visualping, you can use its technology to monitor competitor websites and receive alerts about relevant updates.

To begin monitoring a website with Visualping’s competitive intelligence software, perform the following simple steps:

• Enter the URL of the target website
• Select an area of interest, such as stock level or current price. You can also choose
  All page by using the Advanced menu
• Enter the email address where you want to receive change alerts and set the frequency for Visualping’s checks

Using Visualping’s dashboard, you can also edit these settings afterward.

(Source)

Below is what you can watch out for when monitoring a competitor’s website with Visualping.

Watch Stock Levels

Managing product supply can be tricky; an ecommerce business rarely stays fully stocked all the time. Look out for when and what goes out of stock on your competitor’s website — knowing that will help you decide your market strategy.

First, monitoring stock levels gives you an understanding of items that are in the highest demand. Second, out-of-stock notifications alert you to the opportunity to market similar items.

You can also use Visualping to notify customers of items that you restock by using the Visualping widget, which sends alerts to customers about changes to stock and prices.

Visualping uses two methods to monitor stock levels: Text-compare and web-compare. You can choose either of the two and customize the frequency by which Visualping checks the website.

Track Pricing Changes

Consumers often use price as one of their decision-making factors. While it’s not always the final decision-making criteria, it’s good to know how you compare to the rest of the market in terms of pricing.

(Source)

When you set up website monitoring with Visualping, you can select just the pricing area of the page and receive alerts when your competitor’s prices change. Benchmarking your prices based on the competition helps you stay in a reasonable range for your target consumer.

Follow Job Openings and New Hirings

Marketers often overlook hiring activity when doing their market research, but it can be a helpful tool for long-term decision-making. Job openings and hiring decisions can signal greater market trends that your competitors are following.

For example, if you see a competitor hiring an SEO specialist or content marketing manager, you’ll know the type of marketing strategies they’re prioritizing.

Read Company Announcements

Like hiring activity, company announcements are good data sources to understand your competitive landscape. The quality of your market intelligence increases when you assess each competitor as a whole and keep the big picture in mind.

Learning about competitor announcements in real-time, such as changes in leadership or acquisitions, empowers your strategic decision-making.

Monitor Competitor Social Media With Visualping

In addition to tracking your competitors’ websites, you should also include social listening in your competitor research. Social listening is the process of monitoring activity across various social networks for any mention of your brand, products, and competitors.

Monitor Facebook

Visualping’s competitive intelligence platform gives you an easy way to automate Facebook monitoring with Visualping’s real-time change detection system.

Here’s how you can set up Facebook monitoring with Visualping in six simple steps:

• Go to the Visualping homepage and paste the Facebook URL you want to track
• Select how often you want Visualping to check the page
• Enter an email address where you want to receive change alerts
• Use the Advanced section to choose a monitoring feature. We recommend selecting Visual-compare for Facebook tracking
• Select All page from the Screen’s drop-down in the Advanced section
• Wait for change alerts to arrive in your inbox!

The Visual-compare feature monitors web page pixels and includes page screenshots in your email change alerts.

When you receive a change alert from Visualping, the artificial intelligence software highlights new content in green and removed content in red.

Monitor Instagram

More than 75% of businesses use Instagram. There’s a good chance that your competitors use it too. Since Instagram can generate up to four times more engagement than Facebook, it’s an excellent platform for online retailers like you.

While you can follow your competitors and keep an eye on them by yourself, it’s hard to keep track of changes when you’re manually watching pages.

(Source)

Instead, you can use Visualping to automate your Instagram research for any public profile.

The steps for monitoring competitors on Instagram are similar to Facebook:

• Go to the Visualping homepage and paste the Instagram URL you want to track
• Select a frequency for checking the page
• Enter the email address where you want to receive updates
• Choose a monitoring feature. We recommend using Visual-compare for Instagram monitoring
• Select All page from Screen’s options
• Wait for change alert emails to arrive in your inbox

Visualping will send you alerts anytime there’s a change on your competitor’s account, such as a new post, profile picture, or description.

Other Ways to Use Visualping’s Competitive Intelligence Software

Tracking your competitors’ websites and social profiles is an excellent place to start your competitive research, however, you should also monitor other data sources to get the best information and actionable insights.

Here are a few other ways you can use Visualping’s competitive intelligence software to stay on top of your marketing game.

Keep an Eye on SERPs

If search engine optimization (SEO) is one of your marketing strategies, you should be monitoring changes on SERPs for essential keywords.

After you do your keyword research, you can set up Visualping monitoring for the associated SERP and be the first to know when there’s a significant change in rankings.

Watch Crowdfunding Campaigns

Many ecommerce brands begin as a new idea launched on a crowdfunding page. Tile, for example, raised over $200,000 in 24 hours on Kickstarter. Similarly, Fidget Cube raised $6.4 million on the same platform.

Monitoring crowdfunding campaigns with Visualping can alert you when a potential competitor reaches its fundraising goal, so you know about upcoming products before they come and surprise you.

Track Supplier Websites

The supply chain can be challenging, even for ecommerce businesses. If you want to avoid out-of-stock notifications for your supplies, monitor your suppliers’ websites for stock levels and plan accordingly.

Visualping can alert you to price changes on your suppliers’ websites so you can always take advantage of the opportunity to cut costs.

Additionally, you can also use it to track company news for your suppliers, so you’ll be the first to know if their business gets in trouble or plans for a big shift.

Final Thoughts: How To Use Visualping’s Competitive Intelligence Software

The world of ecommerce is an exciting one. The only constant in it is change, which challenges marketers to differentiate their brands to maintain their uniqueness. That’s why more than 1.5 million users use Visualping for their competitive intelligence automation. Visualping’s intelligence solution provides easy-to-use monitoring tools that you can customize to your business’ needs.

The post How to Create an Ecommerce Edge with Competitive Intelligence Software appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

You may already be familiar with how you can start an online business with as little as $100, but the ecommerce business model has a few more moving parts for which you should be prepared.

Depending on the cost of goods, manufacturing location, and logistics of your products, you have other expenses that start to add up before you see any type of return. Many entrepreneurs decide to buy a business instead of building one from scratch to skip the dreaded start-up phase, but everyone’s decision varies depending on where they are in their entrepreneurial journey.

That’s where Empire Flippers has helped many entrepreneurs find the right ecommerce business based on their business and personal goals. As the largest curated ecommerce store marketplace, we’ve helped thousands of entrepreneurs buy and sell their ecommerce companies. We know how hard it is to find the right deal, and we want to share with you everything you should know about buying an online business before committing to a purchase.

With over $81 million worth of online businesses sold on our marketplace in 2020, there is no shortage of potential acquisitions just around the corner. Once you have finished this article, our goal is that you will know exactly how ecommerce businesses are valued, how to determine what makes a great deal, and where to buy an ecommerce business for a great price.

Before we dive straight into the due diligence process, we should cover the benefits of buying an ecommerce business that already generates steady cash flow.

To Buy or Not to Buy: That Is the Question

Almost every entrepreneur in the digital space has asked this question at least once in their lifetime. After all, why should you pay such a large amount of money upfront when you can start something from the very beginning with less money?

Making this decision is often based on what your business and personal goals consist of. Everyone will have a different side they lean toward, but it will often depend on the number of hours you’re willing to put toward working on the business.

Let’s break down the pros and cons of both to give you a better idea of what is right for you.

Pros of Building an Ecommerce Business

• Less upfront investment to get started
• Longer relationship history with your manufacturer and suppliers
• Establishing relationships with others in your niche
• A better understanding of what is trending in your industry

Cons of Building an Ecommerce Business

• Much longer time to see any type of return
• Risk of investing in a product that loses demand
• Building a social following from the ground up is hard work
• Pay per click (PPC) will be new data that has not yet been tested

Bootstrapping a startup can be tough. If you don’t already have consistent sales, the process to get to this stage can be long and expensive. Depending on your audience feedback, you may need to make updates to your product(s) to stand out in the niche. You might also run into an issue where your inventory runs out of stock—or even worse, you have inventory collecting storage fees since none of the products are moving off the shelves. These all have the potential to be unexpected expenses for any ecommerce startup that many newcomers will often overlook.

As a comparison, here are the pros and cons of buying an ecommerce business that already generates cash flow that you might want to consider.

Pros of Buying an Ecommerce Business

• Save time by skipping the start-up phase
• Immediate cash flow
• Traffic and PPC data
• Scaling becomes much easier

Cons of Buying an Ecommerce Business

• Large up-front investment
• Not being familiar with the operations of the business
• Difficulty finding the perfect deal

Buying a business already producing profits and showing real market demand is a huge reason so many online investors are looking to acquire established businesses. This takes away the worry of whether a product you think is a great idea has a large enough audience and market demand (no matter how much research you have done). To help you find the right ecommerce business at the right price, we first need to understand how ecommerce business valuations work.

How Valuations Work for Ecommerce Businesses

How businesses are valued is a question we get often, which is why we developed our own app and automated valuation tool for a free estimate of your business’s value, which our audience uses all the time.

At the heart of any valuation is a basic formula:

Valuation = Avg. Monthly Net Profit x Multiple

We use the average monthly net profit to calculate your basic valuation, as we feel this is more indicative of where the business stands profit-wise.

Once you factor out additional costs and calculate your net profits (using a three-, six-, or 12-month window—more on this later), you then factor in your multiple. Your multiple can be between 20 and 50, though we have seen some larger multiples break the 60x mark now that these types of assets have gained such a large demand from large and small investors alike in the space.

Notably, the multiple we used in the formula above is monthly. You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization, but you can tell they are using an annual multiple in this case.

We like to use a monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it’s trending. Many factors go into an ecommerce listing multiple, such as the age of the business, the number of traffic sources, and other aspects of the business, such as any trademarks or patents it includes.

When looking for an ecommerce business to buy for a price that fits your budget, you must research five major details in a potential business acquisition.

Initial 5-Step Check

This checklist will provide a roadmap for you to locate the right ecommerce business at a price that fits your needs.

When you outline the details of each potential acquisition, you make the buying process much easier for yourself. This also helps to avoid wasting your time researching those that are not properly aligned with your business and personal goals.

1. Pricing Windows

The pricing window for any ecommerce business will help increase or decrease its valuation multiple, depending on which amount of time is used.

As mentioned above, most sellers will list their business with a three-, six-, or 12-month pricing window. All this means is how much data from the business’ sales history will be used to calculate the business multiple.

This check will give you an idea of how sustainable the business is and whether there have been any sudden upticks or drops in revenue, which would lead to the use of a lower pricing window.

A 12-month pricing window has become the gold standard for most ecommerce businesses, as it gives the most accurate breakdown during every season of the year. Not only will the pricing window help determine the business’ multiple, but the age of the business itself also plays a large role in moving the multiple needle.

2. Age of the Ecommerce Business

Many online business buyers will favor a business that has been established for several years over something still brand new. The reason is that an existing business will have built a record of sales and data—a huge advantage when it comes to buying an ecommerce business.

Making a product is straightforward, but creating a product and brand with longevity is the challenge. The longer a business has been around generating consistent revenue, the likelier it is that the products are not just another trend that will die out when the next peak season comes around, where a different in-demand product is all the rage.

3. Traffic Diversity

It is also important to note how diversified the traffic sources are for an ecommerce business. The more spread out these sources are, the more they mitigate the risk from any sudden drop in traffic and sales. The three most common sources of traffic for an ecommerce business include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Paid traffic
• Social traffic

One of the best parts of buying an established business is the marketing data you receive from these sources (if the previous owner set them up). It may not be necessary to use all three of these marketing channels—as many ecommerce owners may have only focused on one—however, it is important to diversify your traffic when possible. Spreading risk across multiple sources is a great strategy for mitigating risk; if one channel suddenly dies out, another source could have the potential to keep the business profitable.

When browsing through potential businesses, you should also find out where the traffic comes from. The main marketplace that generates the most traffic should always be the brand’s main market for sales.

• SEO: An ecommerce website might include a blog to generate Google search traffic. This is becoming more and more common, as once your content begins to rank, it requires little effort or cost to maintain. If a business relies heavily on SEO traffic, it is helpful to analyze which pages generate the most traffic and which sources make up the backlink profile. This ensures that the traffic is legitimate and that no type of blackhat technique has been used to grow the business.
• Paid Advertising: Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the most widely used forms of paid advertising in the world of PPC today. These traffic sources might be lucrative when optimized, but they can also dig into your profit margins if done incorrectly. Buying a business that already does paid advertising successfully can save you a ton of time and money, however, if a business isn’t using paid ads, then implementing them can bring almost instantaneous results. Gaining data insights into things like ad spend, cost-per-click, and conversion rates will help you scale the business further, already having a foundation to work with. This will show you how much room for improvement there might be and what has and has not been working so far.
• Social Media: We see ecommerce brands with a huge social media following sell in our marketplace all the time. Social media is a great way to diversify your traffic sources and gives you the ability to establish an addressable audience and set up retargeting ad campaigns. Social media can be added to an ecommerce business after the purchase, so it shouldn’t really make or break the deal ultimately, but it is a great extra asset to have if the right deal has built a large following on one or several social media platforms.

4. Customer Reviews and Ratings

When shopping for an ecommerce business, you want to make sure there are plenty of positive reviews for the products you are about to acquire. This is your social proof and product-to-market fit that will aid your decision in whether your newly acquired business will continue on this same track once you have taken over full ownership.

These reviews and ratings for products are important, as they help build the brand’s reputation and give new customers social proof of the quality your company provides. The more positive ratings and reviews a product line has, the higher the multiple for that business will be.

5. Email List

The untapped value for many ecommerce businesses on the market today is the email list.

Many ecommerce and Amazon FBA sellers alike have yet to utilize this excellent opportunity to monetize an email list. When done correctly, it can bring additional revenue to the business, with little effort required to set up.

If you take notice of a particular business that includes an email list, be sure to uncover the value in the list by checking to see if the current owner still sends out regular emails. You will definitely want to use any contact list or email campaigns a seller may already have set up, as they can be a large value-add to any business gaining this addressable audience already gathered for you.

Another component you may want to research is what the open rates and click-through rates are for this email list, as that may uncover hidden growth opportunities to optimize sales campaigns even further.

What to Look for in a Great Deal

Finding the right ecommerce business for you will be much easier when you have a proper due diligence checklist to help keep you focused on what you’re looking to acquire.

There are many factors to consider when performing your own due diligence on a potential acquisition—and it is also important to remember that due diligence is different from vetting.

Vetting is used to determine whether a business is priced correctly, while due diligence is based on the buyer’s personal needs for the business, based on a set of criteria they have already determined. Whether that happens to be a business with an email list including over 10,000 subscribers or most of the product traffic being produced organically in Google, every buyer will have their own criteria to follow.

There are many other details you need to look at during your due diligence, such as the following:

• How competitive is this niche’s industry?
• What is the business doing in terms of marketing?
• How many products does the brand include?
• What platform is the storefront built on?
• How much support will the seller offer?
• Have there been any stockout issues recently?

These are all great questions you should ask yourself while performing due diligence on a potential business opportunity. Not only will you uncover hidden growth avenues in doing so, but you will also eliminate businesses that don’t have your investment needs.

Which Ecommerce Business to Buy?

The specific ecommerce business you acquire will depend on your strategy in scaling the business once you take over full ownership. Are you looking for something passive and fairly hands-off? Or is a business where you roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty during daily operations more your style?

The short answer to these questions will again be based on your business and personal goals. We often use our buyer personas as an example of all the types of online business buyers we meet in our marketplace:

• For some first-time buyers just starting out, they might fall under our category of being a Newbie Norm, who considers buying an online business to get them out of their current employment situation and escape the 9–5 grind.
• Another buyer persona we have is a Strategic Sally, who is a veteran in the online business space and is looking for a strategic acquisition to help boost their current product portfolio.

In these two examples alone, you can see obvious differences in the type of ecommerce business that each individual might be seeking. This goes to show why having a clear understanding of what you’re looking to achieve with your acquisition is important to render your success.

Where to Find Suitable Ecommerce Businesses

So now that you have a clear understanding of what initial checks are needed to speed up your due diligence process, where do we find these ecommerce businesses for sale in the first place?

When it comes to locating an ecommerce business for sale, you have one of two options. Your first option is to go with a broker who will present all the businesses currently live on the market in one easy-to-use platform (like the one Empire Flippers provides), or going with a private deal.

There are pros and cons to both of these options, so why don’t we detail these differences for you to help you better gauge which option is right for you?

How to Buy an Online Business Through a Private Deal

When looking for a private ecommerce acquisition, there are many things you need to keep in mind. For starters, performing a private deal is much riskier than, say, going with a broker to help you facilitate the deal from start to finish.

The biggest cons to performing this type of acquisition, however, is that you have no protection should the deal fall through. In some cases, you might send the funds for the business only to find out that the seller had forged all their income and expenses, and you realize the business is generating only a fraction of what you had originally been told.

There are only a select few reasons why buyers choose to perform a private deal, and this usually revolves around the fact that a broker charges a fee. A common misconception is that paying a broker fee means losing money in the deal, but paying more than a business is worth compared to similar assets live on the market can also end with the same results. What most people don’t realize is that this fee will often mitigate the risk of losing your entire investment completely.

How to Buy an Online Business Through Brokers

As mentioned above, most buyers new to the industry will talk down a broker’s fee before they have ever had a bad experience with a private deal. What most people don’t realize is that the broker is protecting both the buyer and seller should their agreement not align at any point during the acquisition process.

Leveraging a broker helps ensure the deal goes as smoothly as possible and that you, as the buyer, are not investing in some mocked-up scam. Brokers protect sellers by ensuring that they are not giving out all the inner workings of their two-year-old-plus project to someone who will go and copy your brand—or even worse, products—knowing who your suppliers are now.

Conclusion

If you are ready to take the next step in your entrepreneurial journey in securing a profitable ecommerce business already generating consistent cash flow, head over to our marketplace to create your free account. Once you have set up your account, you will have access to our marketplace with new ecommerce businesses listed for sale every Monday.

After reading this post, if you are still unsure where you should begin your search in locating the best ecommerce business for the right price, schedule a criteria call with one of our business advisors. They can walk you through the entire buying process to make sure you are properly prepared to find the perfect ecommerce business that suits your business and personal goals at the same time.

The post How to Buy an Ecommerce Business for the Right Price appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

But there’s a big roadblock to using data: It’s notoriously cumbersome to gather and interpret because it’s scattered among all the channels, platforms, and tools that ecommerce companies use.

That’s why it’s vital to create a single source of truth combining all your ecommerce data in one place. Once you can see your up-to-date data in one place, you can speed up your decision making, reduce the manpower required to gather data, and increase profits.

How Data Improves Ecommerce Decision-Making

Data supercharges ecommerce decisions because it leaves nothing up to guesswork. Deloitte found that 49% of senior executives said they use data to guide their decisions, and 96% of them predicted that data would become even more important in the future.

Here’s how data helps you decide what’s best for your company.

Know What Your Customers Want

If there’s a simple secret to a profitable ecommerce business, it’s having a product and brand experience that customers want.

Data can help you pinpoint what customers want on a granular level, optimizing every stage of the customer journey for more conversions. For example, data can reveal where customers exit as they navigate through your website (or sales funnel), and then your team can make changes until that “leak” is plugged.

Data can even help you decide what products to create and which to let go of (freeing up valuable inventory space). As customers repeatedly buy one type of product and not another, the answer becomes clear.

Know Which Marketing Tactics are Worth It

Marketing is about minimizing cost and maximizing return. Data helps you see which marketing tactics do this well and which cost more time or money than is worth spending for the return on investment (ROI).

Marketing is about minimizing cost and maximizing return. Data helps you see which marketing tactics do this well and which cost more time or money than is worth spending for the return on investment.

Especially for new or growing ecommerce brands, it’s important to know which marketing campaigns work well, which platforms have the highest ROI, and which ads have a significant return (ROAS).

For example, let’s say you’ve invested in Facebook and Google ads for your store. By combining all your ecommerce data in one place, you can easily see which type of advertising performs best for your brand. Some data aggregators allow you to create easy-to-analyze comparison dashboards, like the one below:

(Source)

In our example, you can see that while Google ads are delivering a higher click-through rate (CTR) and more exposure, the cost per conversion (CPC) is significantly higher than Facebook ads. You might decide based on this data that it’s best to focus on optimizing your Facebook ads for higher CTR and cease Google ads to reduce ad spend.

In short: Data helps you double down on what works. It also helps you eliminate or change what doesn’t work so that you’re never wasting money.

This is the key to turning your marketing into a money-making machine.

Know how to Upsell & Cross-Sell Effectively

You’re probably familiar with the oft-quoted statistic that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell to existing ones.

The fastest path to profit for ecommerce is to focus on your existing customers to increase your average order value (AOV) and lifetime value (LTV). Data can help you improve these key metrics.

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a promising upsell or cross-sell opportunity. You can use data to discover…

• Which products are bought most often
• Which products are bought together often

And then use that data to upsell to customers. Take a look at the following example report for a Shopify store:

(Source)

You can conclude that starting with a cross-sell offer of your top product sold, “Blue Silk Tuxedo” is likely to perform well.

Then, data can help you keep a close eye on your cross-sell campaign to ensure that it is indeed effective.

Know How to Optimize Conversion Rates

Without data, you might be able to estimate how well your marketing campaign is doing based on how many people buy your product. But you won’t be able to do much with that information.

You’d have to guess why people are or are not buying. Is it the copy in your ad? Is the platform you chose? Is it your landing page design? Is it the product?

Data removes the guesswork. It can reveal exactly what’s working and not working at every stage of a marketing campaign. This makes it easy to plug leaky funnels. You can follow the data to strategically adjust parts of your campaign until your funnel is converting optimally.

(Source)

The Challenge: Gathering Data in One Central Place

With data powering ecommerce decisions, why aren’t all companies profitable? It would seem that with data backing up every move you make, success should be inevitable.

However, many ecommerce companies aren’t using data effectively because of one common roadblock: The challenge of gathering data in one central place for efficient and accurate analysis.

32% of senior executives reported that having “no centralized approach to capturing and analyzing data for our company’s use” is the biggest barrier to using analytics.

Without an efficient way to harness and organize data, it’s virtually impossible to get the full picture. Consequently, even data-backed decisions might be made in error.

Most companies know this, and so spend lots of manpower to cobble together a solution. The typical way of consolidating data from multiple sources is to do it by hand, copy/pasting from each individual channel:

• Google Analytics
• Shopify Analytics (or WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc.)
• Facebook and Instagram ads
• TikTok ads
• Google ads
• Email campaigns
• Influencer marketing campaigns
• Press features
• Affiliate marketing links

And possibly many more.

Especially if companies create a funnel that involves more than one of the above channels, such as a Facebook ad to a landing page to an email campaign, it becomes exceedingly challenging to interpret the data for each of the parts in a way that still facilitates a view of the whole funnel.

Moreover, this copy/paste method is likely to result in human error and take up unnecessary time and funds.

(Source)

Methods to Create a Single Source of Truth

Along with the traditional spreadsheet, there are more advanced options for aggregating your data into a single source of truth.

The option that will be best for your company depends on your needs and the complexity of your data. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of the major options.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are the starting place for analyzing data, housing all your numbers in Excel or Google Sheets.

Pros of Spreadsheets for Data Aggregation

The biggest draw of a spreadsheet is its inherent simplicity:

• No Learning Curve: Most team members are familiar with spreadsheets
• Easy to Use: Can copy/paste data from anywhere
• Easy to Analyze: Basic data crunching for insights
• Shareable: Google Sheets and Excel are typically available on every computer

Cons of Spreadsheets for Data Aggregation

Spreadsheets are limited in what they can do and how helpful they can be for reaching your goals—and these limits become big problems as your company and marketing expand:

• Limited Cell Space: Large amounts of data from multiple sources won’t fit
• Limited Queries: More complex queries can’t be performed
• Not Ideal for Historical Data: Historical data would quickly overwhelm a spreadsheet
• Not Automated: Manual copy/paste method is slow and difficult

Are Spreadsheets Right For You?

Spreadsheets can be ideal for your brand if…

• You are a micro to small company
• Your marketing is limited to only a handful of channels
• You don’t yet need to run complex queries
• You want a data aggregator you can implement right away with no learning curve or investment

Data Visualization Tools

A data visualization tool (such as Tableau, Power BI, or Google Data Studio) goes beyond a spreadsheet to organize your data in a visual way. This helps team members get a quick overview of what’s happening throughout all channels.

Pros of Data Visualization Tools

Data visualization tools are perfect for fast, high-level insights:

• Automated Dashboards: No need to copy/paste to view data
• Important Information First: Insights at a glance (no need to crunch the data)
• Easy to Understand: Ideal for presenting to leadership teams (who aren’t data analysts)

Cons of Data Visualization Tools

The eagle-eye view that data visualization tools provide can also be a drawback in some contexts:

• Oversimplification of Data: Might miss nuanced insights
• Shows Only “Important” Data: Data deemed “less important” might be left out of the analysis
• Reliance on Tool to Interpret Data: No interaction with the raw data to draw your own conclusions

Are Data Visualization Tools Right for You?

Data visualization tools can be excellent additions for data analysis, particularly in situations where you don’t have time to carefully inspect all your data yourself and need fast insights.

For this reason, data visualization tools are recommended for companies that…

• Want to dip their toe into using data to guide their decisions
• Don’t have trained data analytics team, but still want insights into the data
• Need to supplement a raw data solution (like a spreadsheet) with big picture analysis

Data Warehouses

Data warehouses are central locations for all your company’s data—historical and new.

Pros of Data Warehouses

The biggest benefit of data warehouses is that they are a complete solution to data aggregation:

• Complete Data from All Sources: No limits to the amount of data you can store
• Instant Access to Data: Ability to make rapid, data-informed decisions
• Space for Historical Data: Predict future trends based on a long history of data trends

Cons of Data Warehouses

The potential downsides with data warehouses are centered in the investment they require:

• Pricey: Data warehouses cost the most of all solutions
• Requires SQL Knowledge: Not beginner-friendly
• Complex Set-Up: Big IT projects like data warehouses take time to create

Are Data Warehouses Right for You?

Data warehouses can help you quickly scale your business. But they do require more time and financial investment, plus SQL knowledge. For this reason, data warehouses are best for companies that…

• Are ready to scale (or are already at enterprise-level)
• Have multiple marketing channels to track data for
• Want to be 100% confident decisions are backed by the data (no guesswork)

How a Data Aggregator Spurs Ecommerce Growth

Many companies might find that a hybrid approach to data aggregation works best. For example, they might store their historical data in a data warehouse, visualize it in a data visualization tool, and do simple data crunching in a spreadsheet.

But one thing will be true no matter which solutions you choose: Automating the gathering of data is crucial to avoiding hours of tedium and lost revenue.

This is where a data aggregator comes in.

A data aggregator automatically pulls all of your data into the right places (a spreadsheet, visualization tool, or warehouse) to create a hands-free single source of truth.

Here’s how having a data aggregator spurs growth:

No Time Lag or Human Error

Unlike the copy/paste method, a data aggregator pulls data automatically, so every bit of data is always up-to-date. Additionally, there is far less chance for human error.

This allows you to make solid, data-backed decisions without wondering whether your data is accurate.

One Streamlined Way to Read Data

Without a data aggregator, you or your team members must keep up with changes in dozens of platforms in order to access and interpret your data.

But with everything in one place, it’s not only faster to read your data—it’s easier. And there’s no need to train new hires on every single platform, which means they’ll contribute more quickly to revenue generation.

For example, you can create at-a-glance reports to compare data from multiple sources, like this report detailing the metrics of all paid marketing across channels:

(Source)

More Brainpower for Revenue-Generating Activities

Automating data consolidation means you take that tedious burden off yourself or your team. Instead, team members can spend that energy and time on high-level, strategic activities that will lead to revenue.

For example, the less time spent on collecting data, the more time you can spend on interpreting the data and making decisions that move your company forward.

No Need for Dozens of Configurations & Integrations

Some companies may have experimented with using tools like Zapier to create their own piece-mealed solution to the challenge of data consolidation.

But setting up these configurations takes time and energy, and it can be a hassle to adjust every time something changes.

A data aggregator is designed to pull your data automatically, from all sources, without a third-party connecting the dots.

On-Brand Experience Across Channels

A data aggregator helps you make a sweeping decision for your brand across channels because you get a bird’s eye view of the data.

With your data all in one place, you are able to recognize bigger patterns and trends that surpass the limits of one particular channel. Therefore, you are able to create a strategy that is aligned across your entire brand. Ultimately, this leads to an on-brand experience across channels for your customers.

Faster Growth with Sound Decisions

A data aggregator takes the power of data and makes it more accessible, allowing you to use it to scale faster.

For example, consider the lightning-fast trajectory of retail company Flying Tiger Copenhagen.

Flying Tiger had already had numerous successful brick-and-mortar retail locations but wanted to expand into ecommerce. They had a huge customer base and inventory, so they needed a way to quickly scale and gather the masses of data automatically (or risk an ecommerce flop).

A single source of truth for their data was the only answer. They chose to use data aggregator Supermetrics to automatically pull all their data into BigQuery.

Since Flying Tiger needed to scale quickly, they couldn’t spend time learning a new dashboard for their data. So, it was crucial that they were able to continue with a platform they were already familiar with—BigQuery—while still getting the automatic data consolidation benefits.

Now, with their data in an easy-to-access single location, Flying Tiger is able to effectively scale their ecommerce wing to rival their retail success.

(Source)

How to Choose a Data Aggregator

Not all data aggregators are created equal. You should choose carefully to avoid wasting your time and financial investment.

The following are features to look for in a data aggregator.

Pulls All Data—Not Limited Data—From Your Marketing Channels

Pulling data should be about quality, not quantity. It’s rare that a single company will use hundreds of different marketing and sales channels. Most ecommerce stores have a key circle of marketing and sales channels that they can pay close attention to.

So, don’t look for a data aggregator that pulls a little bit of data from every marketing channel in existence. Instead, look for a data aggregator that pulls all the data from the key marketing channels you use.

Complete, quality connections with the channels you actually use are what will matter for your business.

Serves Ecommerce Companies Specifically

Choose a data aggregator that was built to serve ecommerce.

Ecommerce businesses have different needs and different data sources than other types of businesses. A generalist data aggregator will likely have features that won’t be relevant to ecommerce, and it may not contain key ecommerce features because they aren’t relevant to other types of businesses.

Gathers Data Directly Into Your Favorite Analytics Tool

The problem you’re trying to solve with a data aggregator is to automate and error-proof your copy/paste method, whether the end location is an Excel spreadsheet, Google Data Studio, or something else.

Some data aggregators, like Funnel.io, require users to funnel data into their proprietary platform first before they can upload it to their analytics tool of choice. This doesn’t solve the automation problem directly, and it adds unnecessary complications to the process.

Eliminate the learning curve and choose a data aggregator that will gather data in the reporting tool you were already using, such as Google Sheets, Excel, Google Data Studio, BigQuery, or Snowflake.

(Source)

Creating a Single Source of Truth for Ecommerce Data is Worth It—If You Can Automate It

Using data to power your ecommerce decisions and strategies will skyrocket your growth. But the challenge most companies face is getting all their data into a single reporting tool for easy and fast analysis.

The typical copy/paste method is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. Investing in a data aggregator will automate this process and keep all your data up to date.

As a result, you’ll be able to use your data the way you were meant to: To make sound, strategic decisions and grow your company year after year.

The post Data Strategies for Online Stores: How to Combine All Your Data & Create a Single Source of Truth appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.

What Beamer Does

Beamer is a tool that ecommerce businesses and online websites can use to create a newsfeed for their website. This on-site newsfeed can be used to announce important news, product launches, offers, updates, and content on the site, and it’s a convenient way to keep visitors engaged with the brand.

The tool is easy to use so any brand owner can implement it on their website, and it’s easy to install so there’s no complicated coding or programming skills necessary. Updating your Beamer newsfeed couldn’t be simpler either, and you have the option to add videos, GIFs, photos, links, and calls-to-action to each update and announcement so you can customize every Beamer post to suit your needs.

It’s a flexible tool with several valuable features and services that we’ll discuss in more detail further on, and it’s optimized to be used for blogs, SaaS, ecommerce businesses, and websites so it can even be tailored to different use-cases.

Who Beamer is For

Beamer is for website owners whose main interest is to create long-term user loyalty and whose fundamental goal is to bring back visitors and customers to their site repeatedly. For most website owners, both of these outcomes should be applicable and therefore, Beamer is in most cases a valuable tool for all website owners.

Beamer helps website owners achieve these outcomes by giving them the ability to communicate their most important messages more easily with their website visitors. Other methods of communication, such as email campaigns, are starting to become oversaturated marketing methods that are causing communication challenges between audiences and brands. Beamer, however, is able to help brands create a more direct pathway of communication to their audience which helps build, maintain, and grow better customer relationships in the long term. This ultimately improves brand loyalty, customer retention, and conversions which businesses can reap the benefits of throughout their lifetime.

So if you’re interested in improving customer loyalty, driving customers back to your website, and building more consistent revenue, then Beamer could be one of the best tools you invest in.

Why Use Beamer

There are very few tools that work as simply and effectively as Beamer does to achieve such valuable results.

Any blog, website, and ecommerce store can use Beamer to:

• Increase visitor engagement
• Improve click-through rates
• Inspire more sales
• Reduce bounce rates
• Announce new features
• Reduce abandoned shopping carts
• Make content more accessible
• Get marketing messages in front of a larger audience

There are other tools brands can use to achieve these results — as we mentioned above, email marketing campaigns are one of these tools — but other tools either can’t achieve all of these results at once or they’re not as quick and simple to implement as they are on Beamer.

Creating Beamer notifications takes less time to make than email marketing campaigns and they’re just as effective. There’s also no need to manage email lists and campaign drafts, brands simply add their content into Beamer and push the notification live to their audience.

Plus, the reach on Beamer is more extensive than it is is on other marketing mediums — like email campaigns — because every website visitor gets the notification, not just the users that are signed up to the email list. This means that brands get more eyeballs on their updates and announcements which can lead to more customers and more conversions. The likelihood that users interact with Beamer notifications is also greater because visitors are more likely to click on a notification directly within their desktop rather than clicking through an email that they may not even open.

Another important reason to use Beamer is that it helps brands keep visitors engaged on their site which can reduce bounce rates and thus, improves overall Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs) on search engines such as Google. Beamer helps improve visitor engagement by giving website owners the option to add photos, videos, GIFs, calls-to-action, links, and text to their Beamer posts so visitors can interact more easily with the posts and explore more of the website.

Beamer also helps brands eliminate the steps required for visitors to return back to the site, or to a certain page on the site, making it more appealing for visitors to come back more frequently and check the newsfeed to see what’s new.

Finally, for brands that are interested in more advanced applications of Beamer on their site, you can also segment the updates in your feed based on different demographics, locations, languages, and behavior so you can show users different content based on where they are in your segmentation process. For example, with this feature you can show new visitors specific content on your Beamer newsfeed such as an introduction video to your band or walk-throughs of your products so that you know new visitors always start off with the content on your site that’s most applicable to them and will keep them better engaged on your site from the start.

Beamer Review: How We Use Beamer

We’ve been using Beamer for the last year or so for the exact reasons stated in this article: To keep our website visitors updated and more engaged with the content on our site. If you haven’t already noticed it, look up at our header and click on the notification bell. That’s Beamer!

We use Beamer as our website newsfeed to promote our weekly blog posts, share our ecommerce tools, provide exclusive offers that we don’t share anywhere else, and just generally keep our audience updated with what’s new on the site. We find that our audience uses it as a discovery tool to find other resources and content on our site that they might not normally think to access, and they use it to stay updated with our new content that goes live every week.

Before we used Beamer, we would just send out updates through our email list and on social media but the main issue we found with that process is that not all of our website visitors follow us on those channels. We love using Beamer because our audience doesn’t have to sign up to anything or be active on other social platforms to get our news, which eliminates the friction of sign-up processes and means that more of our audience get our updates more frequently.

In the past, we could also add updates to our homepage but we quickly realized that not all of our website visitors landed on our homepage first, so they wouldn’t be aware of any news, announcements, or updates we had added there. Beamer mitigates this issue by being accessible on every page on our website through the icon in our header, so visitors never have to be on a certain page of our website to receive the updates. We love this feature, and it means that our visitors are more adequately informed at all times.

Beamer is also a great tool for us because it takes way less time for us to create a Beamer post than it does to create or email marketing campaigns. Because of this, we’re able to update our Beamer newsfeed with new content daily, whereas our email newsletter we only update once per week.

Some of the main advantages of Beamer we’ve noticed since we started using it one year ago include:

• We get more traction on new blog posts because we can notify visitors more quickly
• We bring more attention to old content by sharing them on the Beamer newsfeed
• New visitors can explore areas of our website they might not have otherwise known existed when they first arrived
• New and returning visitors become aware of all the resources we have to offer because they can access them directly through Beamer
• We can highlight our products in Beamer, bringing them to the attention of our website visitors which brings us more conversions and more customers
• We can get direct feedback on our Beamer posts through their commenting system and emoji reaction feature which means our audience can interact with us more easily
• We get analytics on our posts so we can assess audience interest by how many views and clicks our posts get
• Our content becomes accessible through one simple click with makes our audience more likely to move around to different pages on our site
• Once visitors click on our Beamer newsfeed icon and check out the content there, they’re more likely to come back to it again and see what’s new

If you haven’t already checked out our Beamer newsfeed and want to see it in action, click the notification icon up above! See how we use it, the content we post on it and what it has to offer!

Beamer’s Features & Services

Beamer is a simple tool that can be used in many different ways, as we’ve been discussing in this Beamer Review, and their features and services are what make it all possible.

The tool has been thoughtfully created for website owners, and although it can be used in the simplest of ways to just post simple newsfeed content, there are some other features that are pretty powerful and improve the user experience, not only for the website visitors but for the website owners as well.

This makes Beamer a very versatile tool and one that website owners and ecommerce store merchants can tailor to their own needs.

Create Your Custom Newsfeed

First and foremost, Beamer’s newsfeed function is the star of the show. Easily create posts for your newsfeed and instantly publish them for maximum audience exposure. No more time-consuming template editing and no email lists to manage — you can get your content out to all your website visitors no matter where they are on your site, when they’re on your site.

Get Feedback & Reactions from Visitors

Visitors can immediately start interacting with your posts once they’re live by either leaving a comment or choosing one of three reaction emojis to express their thoughts. This feedback can help you gauge what your audience thinks of your posts and how they’re liking your updates.

Plan Ahead & Schedule Posts

Create Beamer posts now and schedule them for later to make your life easier and your publishing schedule more consistent. This works well for scheduled content that goes live at specific times (like blog posts and videos) or for announcements where the release time matters (like product launches).

Customize Your Beamer Newsfeed Design

Change the Beamer tool’s color and style so it can seamlessly blend into your website, store, or app’s design. This way it will just look like a natural part of your website and won’t stick out as being a separate tool that you’ve integrated into your website’s interface.

Integrate Beamer Directly to Your Website or Store

Easily install Beamer on your blog, website, store, or app using their embed code, WordPress plugin, Squarespace integration, or Zapier connection. They have a detailed installation guide which also includes their developer and API documents if that’s what you’re looking for.

Implement Push Notifications

Use push notifications as a way to notify your audience of your Beamer updates when they’re not on your site. By opting in to push notifications, your users will get notified every time you post new content to your Beamer newsfeed which will keep them up-to-date with your latest news and announcements and will keep encouraging them to come back to your site.

Beamer’s push notifications are unique because not only do they send to users who don’t have your site open, they get sent out to them when users aren’t logged in either, which isn’t a typical feature that most push notification services have.

Push notifications are a valuable feature to use because they generally have a much higher open rate than other marketing methods, like email campaigns, and they allow you to directly interact with your audience.

The average percentage of unique users that will give you their email and opt in to email lists upon visiting your site is about 5%. That’s not a lot. About 20% of unique, completely new visitors to your site will opt-in to web push notifications and they engage more than with email updates. – Beamer Push Notifications Guide

Push notifications are easy to create on Beamer, you simply create a post as normal and toggle the “Send Push Notification” option on before you publish the post, and when you do publish it, your post will go live on your newsfeed and push a notification out to the opted-in users. The push notification will be created automatically from the post you’re publishing so it will include the title, image, and a text preview and you also have the option to choose where to send the users who click through on the notification, either to your Beamer standalone page or to your website or app.

With Beamer’s push notification feature, you also have the option of choosing how your push notification opt-in message presents itself, which is a huge advantage if you don’t want the opt-in message to drop down right in the middle of your website. Beamer does have that option, but their second option is for the opt-in message to appear in the Beamer sidebar which is much more subtle and discreet.

Learn more about Beamer’s push notifications feature and the best practices on how to send push notifications to your users in their blog article.

Beamer’s Pros & Cons

Pros

• Effective & Engaging: More effective & simple than email
• Customizable Design: Can change the colors of Beamer’s pop-out widget to your own brand colors
• Easy Installation: Easy installation of the app onto your site
• For Any Brand: Use Beamer for ecommerce stores, blogs, SaaS & websites
• Easier Notification Creation: Notifications are easier to create than email marketing campaigns. No need to manage lists, drafts, and campaigns
• Content Options: Add videos, GIFs, photos, text, calls-to-action & more
• Expansive Audience Reach: Reach visitors no matter which page they enter onto your website on
• Push Notifications: Subtle and discreet push notification option that blends in well with your site, and push notifications that can be delivered even when users aren’t active or logged in to your site
• Advanced Analytics: Segment updates to target visitors more accurately, get the view and click analytics, plus audience feedback and reactions analytics

Cons

• Upgrade Necessary to Get All Features: Must upgrade to Beamer’s paid plans to get access to all of the features, including the removal of the Beamer branded watermark, post scheduling, and to get the push notifications feature

Beamer’s Pricing

All of Beamer’s plans have a 14-day free trial so you can install their service into your website and test it out for free before you decide whether it’s the right tool for your brand. This option means their service is risk-free to test out, so we encourage you to make use of the free trial if Beamer is something you’re at all interested in.

In terms of using Beamer long-term, you can check out the Beamer Pricing Plans here, but we’ll quickly break them down here as well:

• Free: $0/month
  • Unlimited posts
  • Unlimited notifications
  • 1 Language
  • 1 User
  • Basic analytics
  • Beamer watermark
• Startup: $49/month
  • Everything in the Free plan, plus:
  • Multiple languages
  • Invite your team
  • Advanced analytics
  • Remove watermark
  • Appearance customization
  • Post scheduling
• Pro: $99/month
  • Everything in the Startup plan, plus:
  • Segmented notifications
  • Domain whitelist
  • Customizable CSS
  • Enterprise-grade support
  • Feedback and Reactions
  • Web push notifications
• Agency: Contact the Beamer team
  • Everything in the Pro plan, plus:
  • Beamer on multiple websites
  • Personal executive

Conclusion

We hope that this Beamer Review has shed light on what Beamer is capable of and that you feel confident in using Beamer for your own website, blog, ecommerce store, or app. Whether you just want a simple on-site newsfeed or a more interactive channel that your visitors can use to interact more with what your website has to offer, this Beamer Review should make it clear that you can tailor Beamer’s features to your brand’s own needs and applications.

The post Beamer Review: Engage Your Visitors with an On-Site Newsfeed appeared first on A Better Lemonade Stand.