Posted February 7th, 2012
by Roger McGershen
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with your own ecommerce website, guess what? Now you have to worry about making sure you have an effective Facebook page for your company/website. Yes. Facebook matters more and more each day as users connect with friends AND brands. If you’re not active on Facebook, you’re missing on potential customers and a potential conversation about your business or products you sell.
Brands and and business are in a constant struggle to figure out how to really leverage a Facebook fan page or get more fans and likes to their pages, stories, etc.
So, how can you create an awesome effective fan page for your ecommerce business? Is there a formula?
BRAND YOUR URL: If you have a facebook fan page that is www.facebook.com/fh87867fh then you’re already hurting brand wise. Make sure you set up your Facebook vanity URL to make it easiers for consumers to find you. This should be www.Facebook.com/yourbrand. Before you had to have at least 25 fans or likes to set this up, now it’s open to anyone as soon as you get a username.
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Posted in Social Media For eCommerce
Posted February 2nd, 2012
by Roger McGershen
Q: I received a call from a company called ‘Ecommerce Positioning,’ about getting better search engine placement for my website and said they work with Fortune3 and their customers. Is Fortune3 affiliated with this company? Is Fortune3 affiliated with any other SEO companies to help the SEO of their clients?
A: Fortune3 DOES NOT work with any other third party or affiliated with any SEO companies to serve its customers for search engine optimization. At Fortune3, we have our own search marketing and search engine optimization team to help our customers with their online marketing needs.
Fortune3 highly recommends that you perform searches and due diligence before engaging in business with any 3rd party, particularly with “marketing” companies that contact you, as these are known to be largely fraudulent or scams, charging excessive amounts of money for unnecessary and worthless changes, and no results produced. Performing a Google search for Ecommerce Positioning will provide you with their BBB ranking of D- for having a large number of complaints and several horror-like stories on sites like ripoffreports where customers have been ripped off to the sums of tens of thousands of dollars.
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Posted in Q&A
Posted February 1st, 2012
by Pablo
There is nothing more important for search engine optimization in ecommerce than having the basic fundamentals in place. When you launch your ecommerce website or as you grow your website and start your journey on becoming an established Internet retailer, SEO will play a huge role in your success.
Let’s list the 5 ecommerce seo fundamentals for your website which will lead to more traffic.
1. Choosing the right keywords: One of the core basic fundamentals of SEO is the use of keywords. Keywords are the holy grail to SEO and basically without using the right keywords, you’re doomed from the start. Do your keyword research for each important page and products on your website. Make sure the content is adequate and not ‘thin.’
2. Unique Meta Tags: Meta tags still play a huge role in SEO. While some may think they carry no weight (and maybe the keyword tag is dead) Google and other engines place heavy focus on Title and Description tags. These tags really help the engines for relevance. For every page, make sure your title tag and description tag are unique and carry the most important keywords of that specific page.
3. Search Engine Index: As basic as it may sound, of course, you need to make sure the search engines are able to crawl and index your website. The best way to do this is by creating an html or xml sitemap to ensure it crawls and indexes every possible page on your website. While the engines may not index every single page for one reason or another, its crucial they do index your most important pages and best sellers so make sure that is happening. Sign up to Google Webmaster tools.
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Posted in SEO for eCommerce
Posted January 24th, 2012
by Pablo
We know most ecommerce businesses, at least start-up ecommerce business, heavily rely on online marketing to really get off the ground. When someone starts an ecommerce, someone always ask, “well how are you going to promote it?” It’s always, “…well, I’ll do some seo, etc.”
In late December 2011 and early Jan 2012, Fortune3 did a survey of around 270 ecommerce merchants on online marketing for ecommerce in 2012. We asked the following questions and got the following responses:
1. Where Will Your Primary Online Marketing Focus be in 2012?
A: Out of 270 respondents, more than half, 56% said they will primarily focus on search engine optimization. That’s more than half of ecommerce merchants to focus more on SEO than anything else in 2012. Social media marketing came in second place with 15% as well as Pay-Per-Click with 15% of votes. Email marketing next with 7% and video and affiliate marketing both with 4%.
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips
Posted January 20th, 2012
by Rafael Solorzano
Starting a new business is always an exciting venture. We know that starting a business requires a lot of work, especially those that understand that starting and running a successful business is all about sacrifice at first until the ship starts going on cruise control.
There are some critical steps to understand and do before launching your ecommerce website. I know you’re eager to get started but take some time and do the following as you’re preparing your ecommerce website. You can do these steps simultaneously as you start building your website.
1. Competitive Research: Analyze your top competitors from “head to toe.” Look at exactly what they are doing and where.
-What title tags are they using?
-What categories are they breaking products down into?
-What type of content are they writing?
-How many images does each product page have?
-What trust factors do they have for consumers? (Review websites links, etc.)
-What products do they feature?
-What type of advantage sales points do they use? (Free shipping over “X”, etc.)
-What are the best sellers?
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips
Posted January 18th, 2012
by Pablo
If you aren’t thinking about branding your current ecommerce business, then you’re not really thinking long-term of the advantages that branding has in really having an edge over your competitors. The biggest brands in the world STILL spend millions of dollars each year in branding strategies. Why? Because they know the value of BRANDING.
OK, so what is branding? Your brand is a message and also a promise to your customers. Your brand is who you are, what your company stands for, why you may be different from your competitors, who you are perceived to be! Your brand is everything. It can keep taking your business to other levels as your brand grows.
So how will you develop or think about your branding strategy? What exactly does branding mean and how can you start branding?
Your brand strategy should be how, what, where and to who you plan to communicate your branding message. Currently, the best way to brand yourself online is through social media, right? This channel allows you to engage directly with consumers.
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Posted in Branding
Posted January 16th, 2012
by Pablo
There are a few factors that are crucial to build an online store. The success of your ecommerce business depends on a few factors but like any business in the world, it can fail. However, if you do the right research and know your niche, you can start a successful web business to make a living and hopefully one day grow your website not to just be another website online, but a large retailer that made its name into a brand.
As the web continues to grow around the world, there is a great opportunity to still jump into a market online and have a web presence. The web it’s so unique in the way that you can build an online store and within hours be available for the whole world to see through various channels of online marketing.
FIND YOUR NICHE: Before you can even think of building an online store, what niche wills you enter? I believe true success (more than just monetary) comes from doing something you love. If you sell a product you love or really believe in, chances are you can do very well as you’ll know how to push the product and your sales pitch won’t just be a pitch.
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips
Posted January 13th, 2012
by Pablo
It’s too often when a company is so concerned about running their web business that the one thing they forget about or put off is actually the very thing that makes the business…the WEBSITE. While you may have built a great website 5 years ago…guess what? Yes…it’s outdated. When was the last time you read your website? Looked at your most popular products? Made sure all font, color scheme, etc is the same?
Entreprenuer.com has a piece about 7 ways to whip your website into shape. We’ll list these 7 factors that can really help you get back on track with your website for this new year. In order to achieve real success within your niche, it’s so important to stay relevant. Even putting the niche aside, your website says everything about your company. If it’s outdated…you are too.
SIMPLIFY: This is very important because a big part of your websites success is all about user experience and navigation. Get rid of old widgets or components of your website in design that don’t have much effect on conversion. Real estate on your website is very valuable and do not cram a bunch of things that make it look messy.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Posted January 12th, 2012
by Pablo
We know and understand how important social sharing means for our content. As the web expands, that also means that search engines (specifically Google) will start using various signals from different channels to make sure they are ranking the most authoritative sites on the web or making sure the best possible piece of content for a query is being served to its searchers. At the end of the day, that’s what will make Google the best product possible, the quality of its search results.
However, this post isn’t about Google but as always, you must understand everything ties in together as an online marketing strategy.
When you have a good piece of content, you want to get the most exposure and user engagement as possible. This means people will share your content on Facebook, Twitter, like a post on your Facebook page, retweet your tweet and so on.
Should I post in the morning? Should I post after people come from lunch? Wait…what about the different time zones? Are weekend’s not good days to post? What about on a Monday when everyone is just settling in? These are all questions we constantly ask ourselves as marketers to really try to get the most of our content from the social networks.
KISSmetrics released a great infographic that details the data on social media and statistics about shared content, when we should post, etc. To have the most amount of exposure is really all about your current social media position as well as timing.
Some of the key highlights from this info graphic that you should really pay close attention are the following:
*The best time to tweet is 5PM EST (U.S. time)
*1 to 4 tweets per hour is ideal
*The best days to tweet are midweek and weekends
*The best day to share on Facebook is Saturday
*the best time to share on Facebook is noon (Eastern Standard time, U.S.)
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Posted in Social Media For eCommerce
Posted January 10th, 2012
by Rafael Solorzano
In 2011 we’ve touched on mobile a whole lot. Fortune3 made great strides in mobile offering its customers not only a mobile version of their backend to be on top of their ecommerce store on the go but the ability to turn their ecommerce storefront to a mobile storefront for mobile optimization at the click of a button.
Why? We know how important mobile is. You don’t have to be an industry analyst to realize that mobile is where people are flocking to get tasks done including their shopping needs. We’ve seen great growth in mobile for ecommerce and continue to do so.
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips
