Ecommerce Readiness
Now that you have discovered your goals, determined your calls-to-action and realize what cost you can afford to acquire a customer, it’s time to explore what more you’ll want to complete before you start marketing. Subsequent chapters cover all these steps in detail to manage everything one step at a time.
Overview: Build your business framework
Choose vendors to make your job easier as you get ready to communicate with prospects and customers, take and ship orders. Select ecommerce, contact and email marketing platforms. Your framework must accommodate mobile users, content-sharing functionality and basic legal notices regarding privacy, terms and conditions, disclosures and compliance, such as CAN SPAM and HIPAA.
Hosting your site
A hosting company with a website builder should accommodate ecommerce functionality and offer a choice of design themes. Make sure you choose a theme that will view correctly on mobile phones, called responsive design. Hook up your accounting, tax, email, fulfillment and other services into your ecommerce platform for ease of reporting.
Shipping products
Amazon’s Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) simplifies life for small businesses and may make sense initially and ongoing for items sold on Amazon. Your own separate shipping center can store and ship product to support your website, affiliate and retail sales as well as ship to Amazon.
FBA takes care of inventory storage, packing, shipping, credit card processing and customer service. The big bonus is that using FBA automatically qualifies your products for Amazon Prime, which means free shipping for Prime members, accounting for an additional 10% in sales volume, plus, you’ll have the boost from Amazon reviews. You aren’t required to sell products on Amazon to use FBA, but if you do, make sure you create a unique offer (more in the chapter on Retail Distribution).
Taking credit card orders
Choosing the right credit card processor, not only with the best rate, but also the most attractive terms, is important to maximize your bottom line. Additionally, review candidates for experience with retailers, ecommerce and support guidance to help prevent fraud and maintain compliance, so you can retain the privilege to accept credit card payments.
Sending email
An email program that syncs with your contact management software, or CRM, is an essential component of your customer service, as well as your marketing program.
Promoting with social media
Lock down the social media accounts early, even if you don’t plan to put content on all of them any time soon, so you have the best chance to get the most desirable usernames, called handles. Choose a message scheduling service, such as Hootsuite to post messages for future dates. Sign up for a URL shortener, such as Bit.ly, to customize and promote content links. Create a Facebook page, secure your LinkedIn Company Profile and/or Showcase Pages for products. Often you can reserve pages and keep them private until you complete the finishing touches and publish to go live. Like URLs, the names where you invest efforts should be as consistent as possible across the networks you use.
Google is critical to your web traffic results. Get Google Analytics (free) to track your site performance. You’ll need a Gmail email address for all things Google, including a Google Ads account to buy traffic, or AdSense, to post ads on your site, even if you don’t plan on creating a pay-per-click campaign right away. This will give you access to Google’s Keyword Planner which will help you select your initial keyword phrases to attract traffic to your site.
Organize your assets
While we’re on the topic of setting up accounts, do it right. Keep all your business passwords safely. You can choose a software program such as Keepass. At a minimum, encrypt a spreadsheet with sign-in links, usernames and passwords, etc. Include the URL to login to the property, your username, email, password and every detail you use, such as birthdate, cell number, security questions and answers. If you lose control of a property, having every detail will help regain it. Make sure to keep these records up to date with current mobile numbers and email addresses.
Think of your domain documents as you would the deed to your home. Save these in a physical folder. I recommend printing them out and keeping them with your other important documents in a safe or safe deposit box.
Organize assets into folders. Make your logos and other images easy to find. List your company colors, fonts and marks, such as trademarks and patents. Collect your mission, vision, values statement and taglines with this corporate collection into a branding guidelines document you share within the company and with vendors, as appropriate, to maintain consistent use across activities.
Next: Plot your roadmap and build your base camp
Decide where you want the calls to action to take place. Naturally, your web site should be the focal point for your efforts, however, you’ll need to ascertain whether blog and social media pages will include buy buttons. These properties where you will drive traffic become your base camp, reminding you not to stray from focusing your efforts to make actions happen.
Then prioritize the properties and activities based on which are the most likely to perform best. This is your starting place; later you can gradually add content to more properties. Track your results so you can decide where to continue to focus your attention and that may well change over time.
Decide how you want to track those results. Begin with your benchmarks on a spreadsheet or in a software program and then regularly revisit statistics, whether weekly, monthly or quarterly.
List all important events for your business, such as trade shows, open houses, webinars, and the like, with any hashtags associated with those activities. Each convention, for instance, may have a hashtag such as #ABCExpo. Collecting this information in a format for the next twelve months, called an editorial calendar, will help you detail your plans for content development.
Content development
Placing a conference on your calendar, for example, leads you to think about announcements as well as speaking and article publication opportunities that go into the pre-planning. Block out promotions, including event emailings prior to and post-show as well as advertising campaigns. Create deadlines for releases, articles and speech preparation. Allow time for development and approvals. Then determine participants who will share responsibility for soliciting, creating and reviewing content.
Save time by repurposing major pieces of content by editing and using new headlines, repeating important content, such as tweets about significant articles, for instance, and by scheduling content a month at a time in advance.
Search engine marketing
Which leads us to one of the most important initial and ongoing activities: choosing the most important keywords and phrases that will draw visitors to your content. Use the Google Keyword Planner, or a similar tool, to check on terms you think of and to suggest others. The Planner will estimate monthly traffic to those terms, helping you to select ones most likely to deliver the right audience.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science that uses the most frequently used terms across your content copy and platforms consistently to attract visitors. Start with three to five key phrases. Continue to build the list until you have ten, fifty and one hundred terms. Over the years, you may identify a thousand.
Initially, the most important phrases become a mantra that goes into your slogan, tag line, site title and/or site description. Your site title and description make up what are called your metatags. Right click on any web page to see View Source and look between these marks (</head>), called head tags.
When choosing keywords, use the strongest, most meaningful one(s) in your meta tag title, between 50-60 characters long for 90% to display properly. Here are the meta tags for Searchengineland.com:
<title> Search Engine Land | Must Read News About SEO, SEM & Search Engines</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Search Engine Land features daily search engine industry news & trends in search marketing (SEM) – paid search advertising (PPC) & search engine optimization (SEO) plus expert analysis, advice, tips, tactics & How To Guides for search marketing.”/>
Notice the choice of SEO, SEM and search engines keywords in the title. Meta descriptions are best kept under 160 characters to avoid truncation by the search engines. The description packs keywords together: search engine industry, paid search advertising, search marketing, spelling out search engine optimization as well as abbreviations.
The keywords used for SEO are different than those used for a pay-per-click campaign. You can use words and phrases that rank the highest for SEO, while you should choose keywords that drive the most audience for the lowest price in Google Ads advertising. Google’s Planner will help estimate those ad costs. For example, a bank might use “mortgage” as a keyword for SEO but isn’t likely to pay the high price to deliver clicks, which is probably over $10/click. A Nebraska bank might, however, buy a low-cost “long-tail” keyword phrase (one with several words), such as “nebraska mortgage calculator” for a fraction of the cost. So, write content using keywords that yield the greatest traffic for the best SEO results.
When you create content, whether blog posts, articles, releases or videos, consider the SEO keywords that you want to emphasize regularly as well as in each piece.
Legal and other notices
Several notices must be ready to post before your new site goes live. Include copyright, a privacy notice describing how you collect and use data, terms and conditions, disclosures such as a blogger disclosure regarding commissions and reference to CAN SPAM, PCI, HIPAA and other compliance, as appropriate.
Recommendations
Learn more about search engine everything here at Search Engineland, founded by Danny Sullivan.