This is a guest post from Jun Loayza, a close friend and an internet start-up entrepreneur out of the Bay area. In this post, he shares some terrific tips and incredible insight for getting your ecommerce store off the ground and competing with the likes of the big boys, like Amazon and Zappos.
At the highest level, an ecommerce store can increase its revenue in two ways:
- Increase traffic
- Increase sales conversions
Small stores that generate less than $500,000 in revenue per year should focus on increasing traffic above all else. It doesn’t matter if you sell the best products at the best prices if there is no traffic to buy your products.
This post is for the mid-sized ecommerce stores that generate between $500,000 – $10,000,000 per year. You could of course use more traffic, but it would serve you best to optimize the shopping experience to increase sales conversions and utilize the social web to mobilize your fans into action.
The following 5 tangible tips will position your company to increase its monthly revenue and become a more profitable business.
[click to continue…]
I received an email from Margee Moore who has a really fun app out now called Sleeping With the Laundry. The app comes with 20 chapters of Notes from the Mommy Track and it’s gotten great reviews on iTunes! Priced at $2.99, it is a steal compared to a book or an ebook.
But I’m not here to promote Margee’s app – instead I wanted to address an interesting marketing question she sent me.
Margee writes:
“I’m running a low cost social media campaign to promote my app, Sleeping With the Laundry: Notes from the Mommy Track. Would you recommend a facebook page, facebook group or what? Which one works best? Then how do you promote your page and get more members? I’ve got my one page marketing plan and I’m working it, but what’s the most effective way to sell apps in today’s social media environment?”
I don’t know all the details of Margee’s marketing plan, but I had a couple thoughts on how she should market her app.
Click here to read how Margee should market her app
When it comes to business books, I’m like the anorexic girl at the five star restaurant. Always order, never eat. Push the food around on my plate.
My shelves are lined with interesting books, but I only ever read a small subset of fiction (usually urban fantasy or sci-fi). I told myself I would not buy any more business books, because I never read them, and because I already went to an expensive business school that assigned those classic HBR essays where 90% of the material from most business books are derived. At this point, if I want to learn more about business, my time would be better spent studying philosophy.
Find out why I finally read The 4-Hour Workweek
Hello everyone! Disclaimer: this is not a typical Social Pollination post with new ideas and opinion, nor is it a summary post with good social media news from around the web. This is just a round-up to share some guest posts I’ve had on other blogs in the last week so people who have asked know where to find them. Here they are:
I also did an in-studio interview for High Velocity Radio which you can listen to here. The experience was awesome! I learned a lot and I will probably be doing much more radio in the future.
Also, for people who want to know more about my new job, how I got it, and what I do, the answer is covered in the full radio interview (not the excerpt).
One note on the blog posts: I’ve gotten a ton of emails asking questions about the material I covered. I’m going to answer only a few of the more interesting questions via blog post here. For the rest – I hate to be a brat, but a lot of the questions are covered in my book, Social Pollination. So my answer is go buy my book 
.
The good news is, if you read that first and then have additional questions, I’d be happy to answer!
Back in college, my sorority had a rule when we were voting in new members: anyone who used the word “nice” to describe a rush candidate got sprayed with a Super Soaker.
Yeah, it’s weird. But we never made the mistake of voting in women just because they were nice. That’s the point.
It amazes me how many PR and marketing professionals talk about the importance of conversation – that numbers and fans and followers don’t matter, and that’s it’s actually about building relationships. I don’t disagree with them. The part I disagree with is the conversations they seem to want.
The conversations most people want are the ones where you nod your head in sheep-like agreement, write a comment like “Wow, that’s amazing!” and generally participate in the virtual circle jerk.
Continue Reading…
Monica O'Brien is the Director of Digital at Fizz and author of the book Social Pollination, which helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth!
