Product data feeds are one of the most important elements that an ecommerce business has to promote the products they carry online. Here, we describe some of the key elements of the product data feeds to get the results from your product data feeds.
If you’re an internet retailer, you’ve surely already tried or are currently advertising in channels such as shopping comparison websites such as BizRate, Nextag and many others. If you don’t, then I’m sure you’re including your products in free sales channels such as Google Base.
Creating your product data feed the right way can have huge implications on the results you get from these channels.
FollowerWonk is a free tool that allows you to enter a keyword and it will instantly pull up a list of Twitter users who talk about that subject. Though it’s not on a real-time basis and just based on certain tweets, these Twitter users are an ‘authority’ on the subject. It list them by the amount of followers.
There are so many great tools out there that allow us to really become better marketers, even those who don’t have much time on their hands; there are certain tools that can facilitate marketing tasks. The tool today that I want to share with you is FollowerWonk.
This is a great little tool you can use and it’s completely free. Basically, FollowerWonk allows you to see who is an ‘authority’ on Twitter based on a specific subject or keyword. By using this tool for a few minutes, I can tell you that it’s not 100% accurate but it will most definitely help you get more exposure on Twitter if you can leverage these users and their followers.
One way to do this is by contacting these Twitter users and letting them know you are interested in them tweeting about your product or website. If you have a weak Twitter account (few amount of followers) you can leverage their Twitter account by having them tweet about a certain product or your website.
Q: I started an ecommerce website almost a year ago today and I’m still not ranking very well for some keywords and not having the sales I expected to have. What’s the average time it takes for an ecommerce website to be ‘successful?’
A: A website can be successful from the first day of its launch to years after. Ecommerce should be seen like any other business and at the heart of any good established business is having at least 2-4 years under their belt.
There are a lot of factors that determine if your website will successful and also we have to look at your meaning of success, which is relative to what you deem successful, right?
When it comes to the success of your website in regards to keywords, it’s all about how effective your search engine optimization is. Currently, Google has gone through some major changes in its algorithm with the release of PANDA which has changes and currently is changing the way Google ranks websites, which is an algorithm that applies even more metrics and signals to ranking websites.
About a week go or so, Google announced the launch of Instant Pages which is a feature that helps users get their desired search results faster! No…we’re not talking about Google Instant search which changes results as your keyword queries change, but a much faster way of browsing the web as Google will load a website you click on in almost less than a second!
As important as it is to have as many Facebook fans as possible to get more exposure to your brand and content, it’s also important to know the reach you can actually have on Facebook. Besides having as many fans as possible can serve as a popularity contest with your competitors, of course having the most fans also means you’re getting the most exposure.
Let’s look at how much exposure you can actually get by posting links/stories on your Facebook fan page.
Recent findings from PageLever found that an average of 7.49% of fan view post on a daily basis. Is this far less than what you thought you’d reach having a large amount of fans on Facebook?
“Pages with the largest fan-base are performing worst while pages with fewer likes are performing best,” reports SearchEngineLand.com. This can tell us that pages with fewer likes may actually have more affinity to the brand than that page with millions of users that just liked it BECAUSE. While having thousands of Facebook fans is great, more importantly is to actually have fans that care to engage with your brand which will lead to better end results for your brand/business.
One market that has been gaining serious ground in the ecommerce space is China. While in the United States we’ve been going through some tough economic times, China has been developing its economy and as the economic power of the population there grows, the internet is rapidly becoming a place of purchase in what is the largest population in the world.
As internet retailers, although we may not sell worldwide, we always have to keep in mind the markets that we can (if not already) eventually break into. China is one that many internet retailers look at to see what possibilities there are in the future in that space and if it’s worth it. Chinese companies such as DangDang.com have gained serious ground generating capital by going public in the New York Stock Exchange.
One way to break through a market in any given country is actually by listing your products in some of their top ecommerce websites if they are an ecommerce sales channel such as eBay and Amazon is to the states and companies around the world.
Thinking about jumping on the bandwagon of thousands of small business to acquire local customers and boost your business. Livingsocial and Groupon have opened the door to whole new sales channels for thousands of businesses are thousands of people on a daily basis join these websites to get good deals.
Is a business model like Groupon and Livingsocial for you? Will that type of marketing (based on cost) have a positive ROI? Not all marketing/advertising has to have a positive ROI initially to get the exposure you want, right?
Let’s look at some demographics and statistics of Groupon and Livingsocial (source: eMarketer.com)
If you’re an internet retailer and still not thinking about online video or some strategy to start think about how you’ll get video on your website, you may be behind the curve. Don’t just think that because your top competitors don’t have video that you’re OK. If anything, that should be more of a motivating factor to get on the ball with online video. If you wait for your competitor to do things and then you follow, you’ll never be a leader in your niche.
Online video can really help boost conversions as consumers may see a video as a great selling point and helpful as well as helping boost traffic from search engines and video engines. We’ve talked about this many times before, just look at how Zappos started to place video reviews of their products and now they are all indexed by Google which probably creates an incredible amount of traffic for them.
Lou Barton, the president of web branding and online video service provider Lou Bartone outlined four steps to creating online for ecommerce:
If you’re an internet retailer and haven’t heard of a flash sale website or haven’t thought about starting a flash website for your business (if you carry inventory on hand and a lot of it) you may not be a thinking forward or by now, thinking about the current state of ecommerce and consumers.
Flash websites have been a hot commodity for certain large internet retailers to get overstock or excess inventory off their hands. One of the examples I can think about that I personally got an email for is MyHabit from Amazon which isn’t really a flash sale website but more of an exclusive overstock sale site which you need to subscribe for. I think the pioneer of the flash sale business model may have come from Woot.com which, yes…got bought out by Amazon by a whooping $110 million dollars.
In a recent post we did, we covered how to promote your products on Twitter. As explained in that particular article, we went into detail why and how you can use Twitter to really get some exposure for your ecommerce website and products.
In a recent post by Wolf-Howl.com, Michael Gray covers 8 ways to get more twitter followers.
> Use private lists to keep track of similar or related Twitter accounts.
> Set up a plan to grow your followers so you can track which accounts are most effective.
> Tools like Raven Event Tracking let you tag specific campaigns.
Product data feeds are one of the most important elements that an ecommerce business has to promote the products they carry online. Here, we describe some of the key elements of the product data feeds to get the results from your product data feeds.
FollowerWonk is a free tool that allows you to enter a keyword and it will instantly pull up a list of Twitter users who talk about that subject. Though it’s not on a real-time basis and just based on certain tweets, these Twitter users are an ‘authority’ on the subject. It list them by the amount of followers.
Q: I started an ecommerce website almost a year ago today and I’m still not ranking very well for some keywords and not having the sales I expected to have. What’s the average time it takes for an ecommerce website to be ‘successful?’
If you’re an internet retailer and still not thinking about online video or some strategy to start think about how you’ll get video on your website, you may be behind the curve. Don’t just think that because your top competitors don’t have video that you’re OK. If anything, that should be more of a motivating factor to get on the ball with online video. If you wait for your competitor to do things and then you follow, you’ll never be a leader in your niche.
If you’re an internet retailer and haven’t heard of a flash sale website or haven’t thought about starting a flash website for your business (if you carry inventory on hand and a lot of it) you may not be a thinking forward or by now, thinking about the current state of ecommerce and consumers.
In a recent post we did, we covered 
