Redstage Magento Blog

One of the most frequently asked questions amongst online business owners is, “How do I get more TRAFFIC to my site?”. You might have the greatest business, best prices, friendliest customer service, but if no one can find your store, you won’t get any sales.

It’s the same principle as if you had a restaurant. You can hire the best chefs, have the best ambiance, wait staff and ingredients but it’s in the middle of the Sahara Desert or the Island from LOST, I bet you’re not going to get much foot traffic going by or too many phone reservations. You want to be on the busiest street in town!

Just having a storefront (physical or online) is only part 1/2 of the equation. An excellent website, with memorable branding, good prices etc… is a great start but the other (and arguably moreimportant) factor is getting a ton of people to your site so you can make sales!

So it’s imperative that you promote your site and get as many visitors to see your products as possible. There are numerous strategies including Paid Search, Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s go through an overview of each type of marketing.

Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an easy way to start getting traffic to a new website. The most widely used PPC services(in order of popularity) are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN (Bing) AdCenter.

The best part about Paid Search Advertising is that it is Non-Interruptive marketing. Most advertising (TV, Billboards, banner ads) interrupt the target and force them to look at an advertisement. The genius behind Paid Search is that you can put your ads in front of people who NEED your products or services by targeting a specific keyword, or phrase.

Think of it this way… if someone searches for “improve my golf swing” the ads are all about books, videos and other training that sell the answer to that exact issue. There’s little guessing when you’re dealing with a search term submitted to a search engine like Google. The person “Googling” the keyword phrase, is looking for a solution to their problem or a cure for their pain and you can easily slip your marketing right in front of them when they are searching. It’s extremely effective and that’s why Google makes billions of dollars selling this advertising!

Social Media, Networking and Bookmarking

In the past couple years, a there have been books written about Social Media Marketing. It’s a very hot topic with the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Buzz & Wave, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and thousands of others socially based websites.

Social Media presents business owners with the opportunity to communicate and connect with prospects and current customers in a way that was never before possible. If you had a website that had golfing equipment, you can socially target golfers by searching their Twitter Tweets, Facebook Interests, and tons of other socially shared data.

In the same way that paid search lets you almost get into your prospects head, SMM uses their submitted and public data to laser target your marketing to communities of like minded people all over the world.

Facebook Pay-Per-Click is also something worth checking out since you can target people demographically with a ton of specificity. You can even target them based on what they “Like”, and more… check out this post written by Ed Dale (a BRILLIANT marketer): Facebook Bombshell.

Like I mentioned earlier, the strategies, psychology and specific plan for each Social Media site could fill a wing of a library. If anyone out there wants more info about Social Media Marketing, leave a comment below.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a fundamental source of traffic. The difference between Paid Search and SEO is that SEO is based on 100’s of variable that the Search Engines use to organically rank the results of a keyword search. The more “relevant” your website is for the particular search term, the higher in the results it will show up.

The actual, specific algorithm that Google, Yahoo and Bing use is a mystery but there have been thousands of marketers that have broken through and figured out what counts and what doesn’t.

There 2 types of SEO: On-Site and Off-Site. On-Site SEO includes the content, linking, structure and code on your website. Off-Site SEO includes the sites that are linking from other places on the web to your site.

The most important part of SEO is a strong inbound linking strategy. Yahoo recently wrote a nice overview of how to get inbound links, here. Basically, you can go out to forums, blogs, article sites and social networking/bookmarking sites and post links to your site. The other way is to get links naturally by posting EXCELLENT content to your site and getting links from bloggers and other sources. On the web, content is KING.

Conclusion

The final lesson for this post is that none of these strategies work without an overwhelming dedication to promoting your business online. Put yourself out there, and tell everyone to tell everyone else about your idea and make it spread.

One of our friends, Mike who owns SuteArrival.com, is a great example of this e-commerce entrepreneurial passion. He’s always tweeting, status updating and promoting his website. He learned from some of the greats like Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com, and Gary Vaynerchuk who are incredible marketers who everyone should follow and study as well.

So with that overview complete, make sure that you keep learning more about traffic generation and studying the new trends in these areas.

What would you like to know more about specifically? If you have any questions and would like more information about marketing your website, leave a comment below! I would be more than happy to dive into any topic above in more detail.

Or give us a call 1-888-335-2747!

Learning Magento can be a tough process. Luckily, over the past few years as Magento has gained popularity, the community has grown and contributed incredible amounts of information about the program.

We looked around the web and found 100 videos that showcase various features and additions to Magento that can help you install, set up and work with Magento E-Commerce. We had to put them in 9 different pages
since loading 100 embeded videos was taking so long. Each page has a category or 2, and a bunnch of videos!

Hopefully this will serve as a resource in the future as you work with Magento, or as an inspiration to get started! If you like this type of post, and would like more like it or anything specific, leave a comment below! Thanks!

And if you have any questions, feel free to get in tough with us regarding Magento Development or Magento Support!

Categories:

General Walkthrough (19) | Magento Installation Videos (7) | Advanced Installation (10) | Content Management (12) | Specific Extensions (24) | Payment Related (6) | Product Management (17) | Shipping (3) | Template Installation (1) | User Management (1)

General Magento Walkthrough

This set of videos show basic information about Magento setup, configuration and features.

Magento Administration Screencast Part 1 from dZero Design on Vimeo.

Disable Caching During Site Development from steve warshaw on Vimeo.

Magento – a quick review of the admin area from Shayne Sanderson on Vimeo.

Changing a Magento site’s favicon is one of the most frequently overlooked tasks.  But it’s just as important as customizing the logo, implementing a unique theme, and changing email templates.  Best of all, it’s the easiest thing to do.  Once you have your favicon, it’s just a matter of uploading it to the right locations.

Where do I upload my favicon?

Traditionally, we used to be able to place the favicon in the web root and it would automatically be picked up by the browser.  With Magento however, this “default web root” convention is overridden by new paths, as defined by two <link> tags in the document <head>.  We can discover what those new paths are by simply looking at the page source.

Look for:

<link rel="icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />
and <link rel="shortcut icon" href="…" type="image/x-icon" />

These (look at the href) are where you should upload the favicon.

How come I can’t see my favicon?

There are a few reasons why, even after uploading your favicon to the aforementioned locations, you still see the default Magento favicon.

• Servers may cache favicons – If you’re running an Apache web server, try reversing these “Cache Your Favicon to Speed Up Your Site” steps.
• Browsers may cache favicons – Try viewing your site using a browser that hasn’t yet visited the site.  If it works in a different browser, but not your original one, then you have a browser-cache issue. Since the process of clearing favicon cache varies from browser to browser, check out “Clear the Browser Cache to Display Your Favicon”.

Ted.com is one of my favorite websites ever. The entire site is filled with some of the most interesting, captivating, thought provoking and mind blowing presentations from the world’s top geniuses and experts. I highly recommend clicking around Ted.com and learning something…

I recently watched this particular video called, “Are we in control of our own Decisions?” by Dan Ariely. Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and wrote the book “Predictably Irrational” (Official Site). His TED Talk is brilliant and has a few ideas that we can use in our online marketing and on our e-commerce websites.

Watch the Video here:

Default Options

One of my favorite takeaways from this video was the idea that a majority of people will simply agree with or comply with the default option. This was evident in the studies that showed the countries with high and low rates of citizens willing to donate their organs. If the question was, “check here to opt in” the country had a low acceptance rate, and when the question was “check here to opt out” the acceptance rate was extremely high.

How can you use this in your marketing?

You can use it in an upsell process. You have to be VERY careful, and transparent when you’re doing it so customers don’t become alienated by your website or flood your customer service number with complaints. Don’t just add extra cost to the checkout, make sure it’s apparent to the customer that it’s happen. There are many marketers and checkout processes that do (usually in the domain registration space (GoDaddy is king), web hosting and info marketing).

Think about this. A product is in your inventory and listed on your site for $10. After the customer gets the product in their cart, and gets to the checkout there is an automatic upsell before the order confirmation. This upsell charges $X that might change the shipping or improve the actual the item in some way by adding a feature, it could be a warranty, insurance, or even an extra product (for example, if you sell glasses, upsell a cleaning and repair kit). If the upsell’s price is marginal (based on the price of the original item, probably adding around 10% – 20% to the order), and the upsell is included by default, you might expect a low rate of opt out based on the data shown by Ariely in the video.

The upsell should be very obvious though so the customer can easily choose to opt out. Just imagine all of your order values increasing by adding in a few upsell options in your checkout and making them the default choice.

Price Anchoring (forcing a Good Deal)

The other takeaway that I thought was excellent and applicable was the price anchoring technique that The Economist magazine uses to drastically increase the number of subscribers that would take a higher priced item. They offer a web only, print only and a web + print option. The Web Only option is $59, the print only is $125, and the web + print is $125. Look at the results that Dan Ariely got from polling students at MIT, with the print only and without the print only options.

The results when the print only deal was an option:

and the results without the print only option:

This is incredible! When people think they are getting a good deal, they are likely to take the good deal but when there are two distinct and different options, price usually wins. Try positioning your products, shipping options or upsells in a way that your customers are getting something for nothing or getting a great deal… A/B test and see what happens. Brainstorm how you can do it like The Economist Magazine did it.

Think about Amazon.com – they offer free “super saver” shipping on any orders over $25. I know that I’ve added an extra product or two into my cart just to get over the minimum price, usually sending it to over $30. I doubt I’m the only one… have you ever done the same thing? This increases the average order value for Amazon which improves their marketing ROI and average $/Visitor among other important stats.

Thanks for reading! Have any feedback or some other ideas from the video? Leave some comments below!

What is your Favorite Open Source E-Commerce System? Over the past few months, I’ve seen a few new systems emerge and they are rapidly gaining traction, building developer communities, and introducing new extensions, capabilities and features. Obviously, we’re big fans of Magento mainly because of the scalability, community and out-of-the-box feature set (as well as it’s current popularity).

As newer systems become more popular, we would like to hear your feedback as to which you like, or think can compete with Magento’s popularity and growth.

After you vote for your favorite system, leave a comment below letting us know why it’s your favorite. Was it a great experience with a client? Are you currently using the system to run an e-commerce business?

On the other hand, you might be a fan of a hosted solution like Shopify or Volusion, or a multi-channel solution like GSI or Websphere – we would be happy to hear about those as well! Leave your comments below!

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If you want more information about any of these systems, here are short descriptions links to their official sites.

Cube Cart
http://www.cubecart.com/
“CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world.”

Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com
“Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien’s support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.”

Open Cart
http://www.opencart.com
“OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.”

OSCommerce
http://www.oscommerce.com/
“osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 231,400 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis. To date there are over 5,900 add-ons that are available for free to customize osCommerce Online Merchant online stores and to help increase sales.”

Prestashop
http://www.prestashop.com
“PrestaShop™ is a professional e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download and use for free. The big advantage of open-source software: you’re never ‘locked’ to expensive commercial software. Our dedicated team and growing user community join forces to fix bugs and add new functionality at a rate proprietary software companies can rarely claim. Join the Open Source revolution!”

Spree E-Commerce
http://spreecommerce.com
“Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby programming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms. Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments”

UberCart
http://www.ubercart.org
“Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal, the leading open source content management system. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much much more!”

Zen Cart
http://www.zen-cart.com
“Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently.”