A new year is almost upon us. Many of you would have budgeted to give your store a whole new look or at least a fresher-upper. Though having a nice looking store helps in getting visitors to stay longer and browse along, having a store with customized features targeted at your customers can help you convert better.
Building your own online store may be easy for some people but for the majority who are not so techno-savy, they will need all the help they can get. Before you jump on the bandwagon to start your own online business, here are a few things that you will need to consider.
Here are a few tips to help you set up online store to target your customers from the get go. Product images on an online store serve 2 purposes – to attract the attention of the shopper and to get them to execute a positive action. The latter is just a fancy way of saying we want shoppers to react by buying a product.
So, how can an image can be used to influence an action? Well, that depends on what information is shared with the viewer. The type of information shared would depend on the type of product on display.
When deciding on what kind of product image to display on your web store, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and figure out what would grab their attention and what kind of information would they be looking for in such a simple thing as an image.
Saw the news that Target has already started advertising their Christmas shopping. Most people may think that was way too early (we’re not even done with Halloween or Octoberfest yet!).
However, this should be a clear sign for online business owners to get their store ready for the holiday shopping season and not wait till the last minute.
Please make sure that your store’ s SEO has been tweaked properly. If you’re unsure on how to get that done, click HERE for a reference to our SEO Wizard Green Thumbs Up article.
SEO works only if there is search trafficfor terms related to a product. For example, if you use a keyword tool to analyze traffic for the term ‘Nike Free 3.0’, you’d might discover that that term gets a few thousand searches a month.
Now turn back the clock 6 years, before the iPhone came along. If you had done a keyword analysis for the iPhone back then, it would have returned zero results. No one would be searching for it because no one would have ever heard of it. So, in such a case, there is no point using SEO and PPC.
October is here! Halloween is just round the corner and so is Black Friday, Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Yes, time to gear up your online store for the upcoming holiday season. Past month has been exciting with Apple launching their iPhone 5 which got everyone excited. Then there’s the never-ending saga on who’s suing who for patent infringements! Anyway, back to the main thing – Your STORE.
Other than getting your social sites all set up (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Google+, Pinterest, etc) along with your SEO, have you ensured that your product images are of the best quality? Because you could have a terrific site with tonnes of traffic coming but if the fish ain’t biting, maybe it’s time to consider the look of your online store and product images.
So, your analytics report says you’ve got lots of traffic from all sorts of sources and you’re even ranking for competitive keywords by accident. Many a merchant would look at you with envy.
But, something is amiss. Your sales figure is lower than Usain Bolt’s 100m world record. What gives?
We’ve already touched on how to make your sites sticky and how to improve conversion in earlier articles. So, in this article, we’ll look at the things a little differently. We’ll try to help you figure out if you’re driving potential customers away. (more…)
It’s been an exciting time for us at the office so far. We recently got our Pinterest page up and running so you could have a look at what we like (it was quite a ruckus when it came to deciding which type of food & desserts to feature!). On top of deciding where would be some awesome holiday destinations.
Visit us at Pinterest.com/InstanteStore and let us know what you think. Feel free to repin. =)
And yes, we couldn’t resist adding the new Apple iPhone5 there along with those new colorful ipod touch as well. If you haven’t set up a Pinterest page for your business yet, I would highly encourage you to do so as part of your SEO marketing plan. This is so that you could share your products and a little bit more about yourself as Pinterest has been gaining ground as one of the fastest growing social media companies.
We were quite fortunate to get featured on e27, a prominent media organization focused on the Asian technology startup industry based in Singapore. Charles had his grey matter picked by friendly chap called Jacky Yap. You can read the interview here.
The interview was published a day before Apple launched the iPhone5 so we had 24 hours before our thunder was stolen.
Get a hold of yourself! There’s no need to panic…yet.
Now, they may be still time to get in some competitor and keyword research done for the Christmas shopping online event coming up in a couple of months. But if you are really short of time due to some unforeseen circumstances, there are still a few things you can do to make the best of what time you have left to prep your online store for the online Christmas shopping season.
What you need to do is this:
1 – Put teasers for your upcoming sales to create awareness.
2 – Get your store’s holiday design ready.
3 – Select the items you want to place on sale.
4 – Use every avenue available method to drive traffic to your store.
5 – Prepare for post holiday sales for bargain hunters. (more…)