New Content Marketing Institute research highlights that the struggle with content management strategy lies in the unused junk drawer of once bright and shiny technology. Learn why marketers are awash and using brute force. Continue reading
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To what extent can we really work on improving ourselves? Are there better versions of ourselves which we haven’t discovered? What answer is your mind providing to these questions?
You probably think you are already the best you can be. But there is always that best version of ourselves hidden somewhere right within us. Only a few people are aware of this and not so many people become that best version of themselves.
If you have been trying to become your best self, then this guide is going to be very helpful for you in discovering and bringing out the best in you. Let’s consider some ways through which we can make this happen and have our lives better shaped.
Great minds think very big. Begin with the pattern of your thinking. Think the way great minds think.
The thoughts that go on in your mind will go a long way in determining what you do practically and what view of yourself you have afterward. Think positively and every time, you should know assuredly in your mind that you can achieve anything you want.
By registering positive things in your mind, your whole being will work towards becoming that great person who you picture yourself to be.
Image Source: Pics.me
You will realize that motivation has a great influence on you. Even when things don’t go as you expect, motivation keeps you going and it helps you maintain your stand until you reach your goals.
You can motivate yourself by repeatedly reading out aloud some motivational quotes. You can also listen to great motivational speakers. Attend seminars that will motivate you for greatness in life.
Image Source: Gifer
Believing in yourself is very important. Believe you can be that great person. Look at yourself and see a successful individual. Do things that demonstrate your better self. Attempt entirely new things and believe that you will do them well.
Don’t go around with low self-esteem, thinking that you are a failure or a person of a low standard. Be sure that you have all it takes to be whoever you want to be.
Tie every single thing you do to a goal. It helps you to be naturally more focused and determined. Write down the things you want to achieve within any certain period of time. Stick to your goals and work towards achieving them before the time you stated. Goals will definitely make you a better individual and make you more focused.
How you spend your time is very important. Do not spend your time on trivial activities. Spend more time on activities that will mold you into being a better individual.
Learn to delegate your tasks when you have too much to handle. Seek assignment help when necessary and make the best use of technology to accomplish your tasks faster. Time management skills are essential to bringing out the best in you, and even after the best in you starts to manifest itself.
Image Source: IMG Arcade
Opportunities lie in challenges. Never be afraid of failure, so that you then fail to take up new challenges. Instead, you should be ready to explore other options and expand your comfort zone. Don’t run away from the herculean task because these tasks will mold you into a better person. Be daring in your attitude, by doing things that appear difficult.
Past failures will hold you down if you don’t let go of them. You only need to learn from your mistakes by making better decisions in the future. All the great people you know have also encountered failure at one time or another.
In an attempt to become your best self, you have to discover your strengths and use them. Pay attention to yourself to see where your strengths lie. The starting point for the emergence of the best version of yourself is at the level of self-discovery. Whatever your strengths are, capitalize on them, as you gradually become your best self.
Roads that lead to amazing places are not always smooth and you may encounter some problems while trying to be your best self. Here are some of the common troubles people face in the process and the possible solution to each of the problems:
You have probably pictured yourself as being a nobody for so long, and now you wish to suddenly change that mental image of yourself and start believing in yourself. You may find it difficult to achieve this in a day, but you only need to give it a little bit of time. During this time, make a list of your abilities and go through it. You will discover you aren’t doing the wrong thing to believe in yourself.
Your courage may fail you and you may feel like giving up the quest of becoming your best self. The change in your way of doing things is the root cause. Try to identify what new thing makes you feel like giving up and devise a way of performing well at it. If for instance, it is one of the new and daring tasks which you have adopted that is making you feel uncomfortable, consider training on how to perform the task in a way that requires less effort.
Fear is a foe and you must learn to overcome it. Fear can come into your mind and then you start to imagine unhelpful outcomes. Fear may suggest to you that you will soon give up the whole process or reduce your commitment to it. Fear is nothing but a waste of time. Try to identify the cause of the fear and address it from its origin. If you still sense the fear after many attempts to subdue the fear, seek counsel from your friends, family or from an expert.
Your strengths appear to be completely hidden or perhaps you think you don’t have any at all. Maybe you aren’t using the right method to discover it. You may not be too sensitive to yourself and that is making you think you lack special strengths within you. In such situations, your friends and your family can be of great help. It’s possible they have identified your strengths. Seek their opinion and take note of what they have to say about your strengths.
If after some weeks of carefully following the guide, you haven’t noticed any change, your mind begins to have some queries and you begin to wonder why? I strongly believe that changes should be clearly visible after about two weeks of rigorously working towards becoming your best self. If you, therefore, haven’t noticed any change, then I suggest highlighting your recent success, or development, and carefully compare it with the development you used to have in the past. I’m sure you will notice an improvement.
You will definitely have more success, achievement and fulfillment to record, the moment you become your best self. You only have a few things to follow and a few steps to take per day, in order to achieve this. Be determined to bring out the best in you today.
Guest author: Lauren Adley
The post The Complete Guide to Becoming Your Best Self appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Too often, marketers speak about search intent from an e-commerce perspective. But where does it fit in content marketing? It’s critical if you want an audience to find your content through search. Continue reading
The post Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Search Intent Optimization appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
This era is a unique one. There are many resources for making businesses successful, especially on the internet, including but not limited to social media, search engines, paid adverts, listing sites (here’s a massive list of business listing sites), and well, internet users.
But not every business thrives, especially on the internet. For eCommerce stores, one contributing factor is a high bounce rate.
What exactly counts as a bounce rate? A bounce rate is actually a combination of several factors, though every time someone visits your store but doesn’t make a purchase, it’s fair to say the person bounced. So bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting a particular page.
A high bounce rate can be disastrous. It affects your page’s ranking because Google automatically assumes the content on the page doesn’t make sense, after all, if people are leaving in droves when they visit the page. I’m sure you can already see how much this would hurt an eCommerce store.
Then again, a high bounce rate also means fewer people are making any purchase from your store. Needless to say, you’ll be out of business soon if your bounce rate is too high.
If it’s any consolation, according to this chart, a typical eCommerce store has a bounce rate of 45.68%.
Image Source: Conversion XL
What can you do to improve your bounce rate? Here are some useful personalization tips.
Email segmentation is a valuable personalization tactic that cuts across all industries. That is, you can use email segmentation whether you’re in real estate, software, retail, entertainment, or any other industry for that matter.
Segmentation simply means grouping your email subscribers by their preferences, behavior, geography, demographics, or their interests. For example, here’s a pop-up from Live Chat Inc that’s a classic case of segmentation.
You can be sure that visitors who are interested only in receiving podcast notifications will not receive emails about a new blog post three times a week and vice versa unless they opt for both.
Additionally, you can segment subscribers by their email activity. A tool like OmniSend, which is an email and marketing automation tool primarily for eCommerce sites, allows you to segment subscribers in truly ingenious ways. For example, you can segment subscribers by whether they have:
From there you can choose and set time limits for these conditions.
Image Source: OmniSend
When you send emails to subscribers based on their preferences, it reduces your bounce rate. Why is that?
Because you’re only sending them emails about things they truly care about and not random offers. Or you’re only sending emails that touch them at their point of need. They’re more likely to click on the link in the email, visit your site, and take action. Interestingly, in my experience, indifferent subscribers will still not visit your site, and it doesn’t matter since they’ll only increase your bounce rate.
Segmenting folks on your email list is one thing, but segmenting your visitors shouldn’t be ignored either. Again, this has a broad spectrum, and you’re limited only by your imagination. I’ll give some examples.
If you run an international online store, you can segment visitors by location. Serving visitors content based on their location is called “geo-targeting.” For example, if you run a clothing business, it is impractical to show visitors from West Africa different types of winter coats, since they do not experience cooler weather.
If you’re marketing a retail establishment that has both a brick-and-mortar location and an online store, you can geo-target your audience to serve up coupons that can help incentivize foot traffic among people within a few miles of your physical store.
Here’s an example from the Duda web design platform, which makes it easy for web design agencies to use built-in options for surfacing different content and design elements to website visitors based on several factors.
Another geo-based consideration is the importance of localized content, making it possible for your site’s language to change to one a visitor understands, where this is available. If you use greetings on your site, it’s a turn off to tell a visitor from India “Good Afternoon” just because it is 2 pm in Australia, your site’s location. Australia is generally five hours ahead, so it’s still morning in Indian time.
In the example below, also from Duda, visitors who visit a “Contact Us” page during working hours are one click away from calling and setting an appointment. Conversely, if they visit after business hours, they can fill in a form and set up an appointment for the next day or whatever day they’re free.
Personalization also involves showing shoppers product recommendations based on what they’re about to purchase from your site. For example, someone buying a phone or laptop may likely need a case or cover for it, a USB cord, and some other accessories. Let them see it in their recommendations.
Apart from your own personalization ideas, you can visit as many eCommerce stores as possible to get inspiration.
Your eCommerce store’s product page is almost literally the most valuable page on your eCommerce site. Optimizing it for SEO is important especially if many of your visitors are coming from search engines. One of the best ways you can enhance your store’s SEO is by using rich snippets. Here’s what I mean:
When people see the price, availability, rating, and number of reviews on a product they want to purchase, most can decide whether to visit the store or not. Visitors will be people who are likely interested in that product’s page after seeing such information. Automatically, this will improve your bounce rate.
A study has shown that adding videos to your product page increases average order value by as much as 50%, while customers are 65% to 85% more likely to purchase from you after watching a video. When you use videos and high-quality product images on your product pages, it’s more than likely you’ll convince a visitor to purchase your product. That’s good for your business, good for your bounce rate, and ultimately good for SEO.
You’d think this is conventional wisdom, but you’ll be surprised how many eCommerce stores inadvertently make the shopping experience difficult for visitors or shoppers.
A study has shown that 11% of cart abandonment happens because shoppers see the checkout process as too complicated. Some industries experience cart abandonment as high as 83.6% according to this chart from the Sales Cycle.
So what are some factors that can contribute to a lack of a streamlined experience for shoppers on your site? They include but are not limited to:
To curb this, remember that you can never be too straightforward or explicit on your eCommerce site. With the ever-dwindling attention spans of humans, if shoppers have to spend too long trying to make sense of anything about your checkout process, you’ll lose them. This is especially true if they’re doing comparison shopping, and they have several other tabs open of sites selling the same products.
Still, once customers show an intent to purchase, you can always use exit-intent pop-ups to get some of their attention if they’re leaving without purchasing. As an example, you can offer them a discount.
Or for those who have added items to their cart already and are about to leave without buying, you can offer to email them their cart. That serves two purposes: you can contact them in the future, and they’re less likely to abandon their cart too.
A study by Barilliance shows that the “email-me-my-cart” email converts significantly higher than other types of email including conventional cart abandonment emails.
When you make the entire shopping experience a smooth one for shoppers on your site, you’ll lower your bounce rate.
Thankfully, a high bounce rate is not irreversible. If you follow these tips, you’ll not only lower your bounce rates but you’ll be smiling all the way to the bank. What are you waiting for?
Guest author: Vikas Agrawal is a start-up Investor & co-founder of the Infographic design agency Infobrandz that offers creative and premium visual content solutions to medium to large companies. Content created by Infobrandz are loved, shared & can be found all over the internet on high authority platforms like HuffingtonPost, Businessinsider, Forbes , Tech.co & EliteDaily.
The post How to Reduce Your eCommerce Bounce Rates by 30-40% Using Personalization appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Storytelling is an art, and when it’s about your brand messaging, it gets a lot more challenging than usual.
You need to incorporate every single detail about your brand into your brand’s message. What you do. Around which beliefs your brand strategy revolves. In what tone you describe your products/ services. Who your employees are. What makes your brand unique when compared with others.
Combining all these blocks, you need to construct a clear yet cohesive message that resonates with your target audience effortlessly, this is what we call a Brand Message.
When you work with multiple content creators, it becomes a bit tricky to infuse the factor of uniformity within your brand messages. When it comes to sending your message across the audience, no matter which content you are working on; an ad copy, web content, calls-to-action or social media, every single piece of writing needs to be consistent and evenly toned. If your brand messages fail to complement your brand story that means you need to work on the architecture of your brand messaging.
In order to tell your brand story the right way, you need to fix all the faults in the style and tone of your messaging. But how do you know that you need to work on it to make it better?
Here are 5 signs that your brand messaging needs to be put right before proceeding further.
Suppose you are a fitness wear brand and your brand message includes only a few inspirational taglines and a couple of ad campaigns involving celebrities. Would it be sufficient to match the standard that Nike has built over the decades? Absolutely not. Nike is a brand that has always made its mark with gripping storytelling. The brand always comes up something so compelling that the audience can’t help but connect instantly with the brand. With their brand messaging they have always strived to induce some kind of positive change in their audience’s mindset. Think of their Equality campaign, that was more than a promotional campaign, a movement that got the audience hooked and connected at a large scale.
If you fail to offer any of the values that have been described with Nike’s example, that means you have got nothing special and inspiring to contribute. Then why would they be interested in listening to you?
Fix it: If you really want to induce a sense of connectivity, you need to work on the bigger picture rather than just a promotional campaign. You need to articulate a framework based on your values and beliefs. You need to tell your audience what difference you want to make with your brand. You need to craft the stories based on your brand’s principles and come up with the right way to convey your stories.
Before sending your message across, first of all, you need to know the audience you are having a conversation with. You can’t just create a single message for a different set of the audience as every set may have a separate intellect and their needs and personas can be miles apart. Therefore, you need to understand the needs and wants of a particular audience, and then your message should be framed to address those needs.
Fix it: To understand a particular audience, you need to create personas first. You can conduct brief surveys through your web forms or email marketing. The responses gathered from these places can help you understand their goals, fears, needs, and with the help of all the accumulated points, you can tailor your brand message to represent the various segments.
Brand messaging architecture sounds like complicated terminology. However, it’s a simple concept that once understood, can bring tremendous results in terms of storytelling. It’s a simple framework that needs to be established before you craft a brand message as it helps your team to educate people about your brand and it makes sure that there is a minimum disturbance in your message, as well as completely resonating with a target market.
Fix it: If you are still unaware of the ingredients of an effective Brand messaging architecture, let’s have a look at the elements that you need to combine to make one.
In order to clearly define these elements, you need to gather your creative team members on the same page and make them aware of each aspect that constitutes your brand messaging architecture. Once each of the elements has been articulated, next you need to visualize them so that content creators become aware of the implementation strategy. Not only this, but you should also make sure that your team is familiar with your brand guidelines.
Striking brand messaging is not only about what you have to communicate. It’s about the way you communicate and the way you tell your story. Do you have emotional hooks? Is your voice capable enough to get people connected and involved? If not, then all your brand messaging efforts will be in vain. On a daily basis, we bump into dozens of brand messages which fail to evoke an urge to get involved with the brand. Why? Because they fail to develop a convincing and unique tone/voice of their own.
Fix it: Brand tone and voice are more than just a custom logo design, punchy slogan, and color scheme. The horizons have been expanded and modern-day branding demands a lot of input from the marketer’s end. If you really want someone to become a brand advocate, you will have to bring something that really matters to them.
For example, Dollar Shave Club is a brand which has developed a personality with their eccentric humor and the ability to convey the way it is. Their casual, short and clean copy has been formulated to cater to men primarily, from their web copy to social channels, they successfully maintain the sweet and straightforward tone.
Wherever you get the chance to flaunt your brand, you should flaunt your brand. Remember that a commercial is not the only place through which you can show how wonderful your brand is and why people should be connected with this brand. If you are a talented as well as witty content creator, you can create the magic with any piece of copy that you work on.
Fix it: Consider your calls-to-action, your social media bios, as well as your product descriptions, as the golden spots where you can play with the words to insinuate who you are. These are the spots you can get the maximum advantage of conveying your brand impression without having to put in extra effort.
Only a well-defined and finely executed framework will help your team curate your branding message in a homogenous way.
There are numerous ways to communicate your brand message to your target market. However, your brand message should always orbit around your brand strategy and each attempt of brand communication should be meant to reinforce the brand’s goals and vision. Remember, without a thoughtfully crafted plan your brand messaging efforts will bring you anything but the desired results.
Guest author: Loius Martin is a Creative Marketing Manager at Invictus Studio, a design company situated in Dallas. He has been guest blogging for quite a long time about design, search engine marketing and branding. You can follow him at @loiusmartin1
The post 5 Fundamental Flaws With Your Brand Messaging (And Ways To Fix Them) appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
“A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless.”
Stephen King
Building a product is easy. Map the challenges your industry faces – brainstorm over the solutions – pick one that’d be an easy target- hire a team of qualified engineers – build. But, equally challenging is the concept of building a brand. I’ll tell you why.
On March 21, 1978, when inflation was high, a startup called “NoName” was launched by Loblaw with 16 non-branded items in yellow and black packaging. NoName gained huge popularity in its initial years due to guaranteed savings of 10 to 40 percent over other national brands. However, the startup flopped even though it was yielding great solutions.
According to an article published by The New York Times in 1986, No Frills, No Sale, NoName didn’t survive long. As per analysts, it came to a point of extinction in 1983 due to the degrading faith of people in generic products that lacked a brand name, a buyer could blindly rely upon. NoName’s failed attempts at building a rapport with its customers gave its competitors an upper-edge that constantly were leveraging regular promotions to build a brand for themselves.
As ideas shape the course of history, a new NoName, this time called “Brandless” got launched in July 2017 with a similar motto.
Brandless promised to sell each product, from the list of 115 products it was rolled out with, at a reasonable price tag of $3. The direct-to-consumer brand claimed to eliminate the hidden costs, up to 40 percent, under “brand tax” associated with branding, promotions, distributions, etc of the products.
Though the idea was marvelous, it didn’t take long for Tina Sharkey, co-founder at Brandless, to realize the significance of facing the irony. Brandless joined hands with Red Antler, a branding agency in New York that works with giants like Google and Casper, to place the one piece left to complete the Jigsaw. And, it paid off well – the Brandless brand announced a $240 million funding round last July.
Being a product owner, the best thing in your power is to offer great solutions. Whereas, turning that product into a brand requires way more than that. A brand needs proof. It asks you to earn a customer’s trust. It asks you to regularly engage with that customer. More than anything, it expects that customer to reach your next prospect before your rivals/their customers do. Brand building is a hard win. Retailers would know best, as many in the industry have now started to realize the struggle. The influence that an audience owner, in the same market, exerts over the targeted persona is hard to match for these retailers. And, that is exactly why they need audience owners to back them up.
Commerce publishers today review products and cover their major updates day-in-day-out. It’s a core part of their job to connect dots to anticipate a product’s next big move, perform product breakdowns and create an intriguing case study that either boasts about the product or drills down to its silly mistakes.
Online retailers have started approaching these publishers to shift this content under their hood. Amazon – the biggest online distributor, reached out to small or less established publishers of late and asked them to post their content directly on its website. Where Amazon got to experiment with its conversion via owned content tactic, many entry-level publishers took it as their big break and readily agreed. How perfect can this targeting be?
On a land, not too far, six fully-fledged bedding stores right now breathe under the umbrella of Parachute. Born online, unlike many brands in this space, this bedding and bathroom linen startup focuses on building a brand identity that doesn’t rely on the walled gardens. Luke Droulez, the chief marketing officer at Parachute, in a podcast stated – “I don’t want to be known as a Facebook brand or an Instagram brand”. Instead, he’d like Parachute to be known as a lifestyle brand that has people’s best-kept secrets.
To achieve this, brands need to interact with their audience across multiple touchpoints. Dependence on a third party channel for the brand building would become as derailing as banner blindness in advertising.
An audience with a brand associated with it is a publisher’s most valuable asset. Hence, posting content on a third party channel, like Amazon, becomes too risky to consider.
The big-name publishers will always resist submitting their “carton of long-term benefits” to a retailer after what they’ve earned from the digital walled gardens. But, those struggling for recognition in the industry won’t think twice.
Is there anything that the industry can do to ease the plight? Enter commerce publishers building the solutions (products) that they were directing their audience too.
The success metrics of publishers reside in building a following that trusts their opinions. A fanbase that believes what they foresee within the industry. Actionable suggestions to such a fanbase own high possibility of not just getting followed and adopted but also recommended (not to mention, quality of products must match the set standards). With great reach and power, comes great responsibility. Publishers can’t just afford to flounder the trust that they have built over the years. This influence once earned, which most of the big names in the industry already do, can bring incremental dollars to a publisher that owns the product instead of just being an affiliate.
Selling products built by themselves improves a publisher’s monetization stack which currently is experiencing shrinking ad revenue and poorly performing gated content monetization modeling. The model is comparatively simpler to adapt and owns high chances of scaling given the connection, pre-built with website audience.
Publishers need to look for a sustainable revenue source that once geared up doesn’t roll back the way ad revenue from the duopoly (Google and Facebook) did. Selling owned products, especially for niche publishers that have spent 1000’s of hours building an expertise in the domain, can become one such reliable source due to:
Publishers can also consider developing “easy to build” tools that are needed on a regular basis in their organization. These tools reduce business expenditure in the long run and can be used as a monetization channel provided it resonates with your industry.
An audience!
You need a regularly engaged website audience that trusts your brand. You need a rapport in place with this audience. As we know, the best business deals let both parties win. You sell the products and take your cut. At the same time, the audience doesn’t feel disappointed with the purchase and never regrets investing faith in your brand. A reliable audience is all you need.
To build your way to this monetization source, you need to:
Selling products from companies that target your website audience has become a widespread practice in publishing. Becoming an affiliate is not very difficult. You need to find the brands that target your potential segments. This can be achieved by searching for relevant listicles on Google SERPs. For instance, if you want a listicle of the brands providing sports apparel, you can search for “Best x sportswear brands”. Choose from a number of listicles ranking above. Compare and reach out to become a partner.
If finding brands looking for an affiliate seems backbreaking to you, becoming a partner at affiliate programs is always an easier way out. You can choose from various programs including the likes of the Amazon affiliate program and Shareasale. The revenue per sale might be lesser here due to the presence of a third party platform. But, those that are beginning their journey with affiliate advertising should consider trying their skills on an established platform first to build an understanding of the channel. Follow the respective instructions of the program you’ve selected. Link the product where the chances of selling are high and promote. Post on social media, newsletters, your homepage, etc.
Mid and large enterprise publishers have started to work with this newbie of late. Selling owned products put a lot at stake but, it’s a monetization source that once geared up leaves no room for the product to roll back. Start with mapping challenges the industry faces. Brainstorm to reach the most efficient solutions. Find existing solutions and list the favorable ones considering its market value, buzz amongst the audience, and performance. Conduct product analysis and take consultations. While playing big, advice from someone much experienced to assist with the dos and don’ts, always helps. Build a team to assist with customer queries.
Or become the solution provider that builds to solve the core challenges of its audience. Give your followers one more reason to feel proud. Build products that don’t provide a compromised solution.
Start with figuring out the solution, found above, that would get solved with an easy-to-build product. Analyze the market and create a product roadmap. Define the value it will add to your customer’s problem. Define the acquisition cost per customer. Consult industry leaders with more expertise. Hire a team to build the product and one later to support with customer queries. Share your brand story. Products don’t just sell by themselves, you’ll need to leverage advertising and regular promotions
Is anyone calling the Police? Because Buzzfeed is on fire!
Spreading viral content since 2006, this American media company is just not slowing down. It’s always hunting new sources to stretch its revenue muscles. Wait, not again.
Buzzfeed launched Tasty (to boost revenue from native ads) as an experiment which turned out to be its easiest entrance into eCommerce. Tasty was found to have 98 million followers on Facebook in January 2019.
Well, who wouldn’t have a yen for their delicacies like keto-free lasagna? The platform is filled with recipes that would either take you to a cookbook page or would require you to buy an instant pot from Tasty’s cookware line. To the surprise of those struggling with shrinking ad revenue, the brand is working wonders with no dirty tricks associated. The product line of the #1 content publisher on Facebook sold around 1.5million products last year. And no, the above-mentioned tricks weren’t dirty but a commendable approach towards generating more and better opportunities.
BuzzFeed has time and again proved that they know exactly what the world needs next. Tasty, in 2017, rolled out a $149 Bluetooth enabled hot plate which BuzzFeed referred to as a “precision smart cooktop”. With an included thermometer, detecting the internal temperature of the food and a One Top App notifying when to flip or when to add the next ingredient, this invention, according to BuzzFeed, functions as a culinary Swiss Army knife.
Tasty has also started a joint venture with Walmart. Yes, the biggest global retailer will now be providing a dedicated shelf to the Tasty-branded kitchen products in their 4000 stores. These products would include spatulas, cooking steels, mixing bowls, etc with a price ranging from $4.4 to $99. Buzzfeed has entered the easy streets in a world dreaded by the duopoly.
Now, keep the jaw dropped as I move forward. Tasty is just one of their six verticals that have stunned the industry with its cutting-edge innovations. BuzzFeed’s other vertical – Goodful recently collaborated with the Macy to launch a houseware-product-line with 100 products ranging from $15 to $230. Buzzfeed Reviews, founded last year exclusively for affiliate businesses, is a product recommendation site that takes a cut from every product they help getting sold. Buzzfeed News, with a membership plan of $5/month, brings the latest lumps of viral global news in its emailer. In August 2018, Buzzfeed started asking its readers to donate between $5 to $100 to support the organization and, what might surprise you, the average donation made was of $20.
Because the audience consuming your content is really smart. And, for a smart audience, identifying products that you own and the ones you’re just getting a commission out of, isn’t tough. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and post 10 legitimate reasons for using product x of a particular material. Mention an affiliate product next to that and watch readers scrolling past it thinking it’s a regular sales pitch. Like they always do.
Or build one yourself and pitch that as a solution. Let the audience know how followers contacted you with a bag full of problems and prompted you to come up with a solution like that. Tell them what makes the product different from those that are failing to meet expectations. Share the story your product has. Promote it on newsletters, social channels, your homepage and watch readers checking out the product. Like they rarely do.
It won’t be a product suggestion to them anymore but an innovative approach pulled off by the most faithful industry leader.
To put this straight, being an affiliate comes with a lot of responsibilities and hard work. Being a performance-based marketing channel, affiliate marketing requires you to do regular promotions and stuff links wherever you can. It needs a huge chunk of traffic AND subscribers to bite the initial buying phase of a product. Let’s leave the unsubscriptions that follow for the next time.
Basically, as an affiliate, you break your neck to sell something that many like you already are. That too for the same price, at the same time, probably using the same sales pitch. Tell me something – does a slivered commission justify the efforts you put in for someone else’s product? Yes, slivered! Only 5% of affiliates make more than $100 a month. We all know how big of a race you would have to win to enter that top 5%. Building your own product helps to get out of the rest of 95% striving for more revenue.
Well, it’s not. The biggest flaw in building products for eCommerce revenue is dealing with ongoing issues. Being a publisher, you hold the expertise in the domain. You’ve been burning the midnight oil to figure out where the industry proceeds next. What you, however, don’t possess are the technical skills. It isn’t feasible for a publisher to rectify and correct the technical malfunctions every now and then. Publishers would need someone to turn to at such point in time. Of course, there are solutions (with, ahem! investments).
Look, engineers are expensive to keep. We all know that. But, we’re progressing beyond ads and affiliates here. And, beyond ads and affiliates, you’ll experience several pitfalls along with boosted revenue, which is absolutely fair. You’d need to hire a fully-fledged customer support team for such circumstances.
Absolutely not. Commerce publishers have been hanging around, exercising their affiliate monetization strategies, for a while now. Whereas, selling owned products is still a budding monetization strategy. But, those that were tired of working with Google and Facebook, and making far too little for the value they were delivering, tried this. Those that were backed by a good volume of audience, built their products and made it big. You should be next.
Guest author: Neha Tanwer is a Product Marketer at iZooto where she helps publishers monetize their digital content.
The post Why Digital Publishers Are Creating Products (And You Should Too) appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
This era is a unique one. There are many resources for making businesses successful, especially on the internet, including but not limited to social media, search engines, paid adverts, listing sites (here’s a massive list of business listing sites), and well, internet users.
But not every business thrives, especially on the internet. For eCommerce stores, one contributing factor is a high bounce rate.
What exactly counts as a bounce rate? A bounce rate is actually a combination of several factors, though every time someone visits your store but doesn’t make a purchase, it’s fair to say the person bounced. So bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting a particular page.
A high bounce rate can be disastrous. It affects your page’s ranking because Google automatically assumes the content on the page doesn’t make sense, after all, if people are leaving in droves when they visit the page. I’m sure you can already see how much this would hurt an eCommerce store.
Then again, a high bounce rate also means fewer people are making any purchase from your store. Needless to say, you’ll be out of business soon if your bounce rate is too high.
If it’s any consolation, according to this chart, a typical eCommerce store has a bounce rate of 45.68%.
Image Source: Conversion XL
What can you do to improve your bounce rate? Here are some useful personalization tips.
Email segmentation is a valuable personalization tactic that cuts across all industries. That is, you can use email segmentation whether you’re in real estate, software, retail, entertainment, or any other industry for that matter.
Segmentation simply means grouping your email subscribers by their preferences, behavior, geography, demographics, or their interests. For example, here’s a pop-up from Live Chat Inc that’s a classic case of segmentation.
You can be sure that visitors who are interested only in receiving podcast notifications will not receive emails about a new blog post three times a week and vice versa unless they opt for both.
Additionally, you can segment subscribers by their email activity. A tool like OmniSend, which is an email and marketing automation tool primarily for eCommerce sites, allows you to segment subscribers in truly ingenious ways. For example, you can segment subscribers by whether they have:
From there you can choose and set time limits for these conditions.
Image Source: OmniSend
When you send emails to subscribers based on their preferences, it reduces your bounce rate. Why is that?
Because you’re only sending them emails about things they truly care about and not random offers. Or you’re only sending emails that touch them at their point of need. They’re more likely to click on the link in the email, visit your site, and take action. Interestingly, in my experience, indifferent subscribers will still not visit your site, and it doesn’t matter since they’ll only increase your bounce rate.
Segmenting folks on your email list is one thing, but segmenting your visitors shouldn’t be ignored either. Again, this has a broad spectrum, and you’re limited only by your imagination. I’ll give some examples.
If you run an international online store, you can segment visitors by location. Serving visitors content based on their location is called “geo-targeting.” For example, if you run a clothing business, it is impractical to show visitors from West Africa different types of winter coats, since they do not experience cooler weather.
If you’re marketing a retail establishment that has both a brick-and-mortar location and an online store, you can geo-target your audience to serve up coupons that can help incentivize foot traffic among people within a few miles of your physical store.
Here’s an example from the Duda web design platform, which makes it easy for web design agencies to use built-in options for surfacing different content and design elements to website visitors based on several factors.
Another geo-based consideration is the importance of localized content, making it possible for your site’s language to change to one a visitor understands, where this is available. If you use greetings on your site, it’s a turn off to tell a visitor from India “Good Afternoon” just because it is 2 pm in Australia, your site’s location. Australia is generally five hours ahead, so it’s still morning in Indian time.
In the example below, also from Duda, visitors who visit a “Contact Us” page during working hours are one click away from calling and setting an appointment. Conversely, if they visit after business hours, they can fill in a form and set up an appointment for the next day or whatever day they’re free.
Personalization also involves showing shoppers product recommendations based on what they’re about to purchase from your site. For example, someone buying a phone or laptop may likely need a case or cover for it, a USB cord, and some other accessories. Let them see it in their recommendations.
Apart from your own personalization ideas, you can visit as many eCommerce stores as possible to get inspiration.
Your eCommerce store’s product page is almost literally the most valuable page on your eCommerce site. Optimizing it for SEO is important especially if many of your visitors are coming from search engines. One of the best ways you can enhance your store’s SEO is by using rich snippets. Here’s what I mean:
When people see the price, availability, rating, and number of reviews on a product they want to purchase, most can decide whether to visit the store or not. Visitors will be people who are likely interested in that product’s page after seeing such information. Automatically, this will improve your bounce rate.
A study has shown that adding videos to your product page increases average order value by as much as 50%, while customers are 65% to 85% more likely to purchase from you after watching a video. When you use videos and high-quality product images on your product pages, it’s more than likely you’ll convince a visitor to purchase your product. That’s good for your business, good for your bounce rate, and ultimately good for SEO.
You’d think this is conventional wisdom, but you’ll be surprised how many eCommerce stores inadvertently make the shopping experience difficult for visitors or shoppers.
A study has shown that 11% of cart abandonment happens because shoppers see the checkout process as too complicated. Some industries experience cart abandonment as high as 83.6% according to this chart from the Sales Cycle.
So what are some factors that can contribute to a lack of a streamlined experience for shoppers on your site? They include but are not limited to:
To curb this, remember that you can never be too straightforward or explicit on your eCommerce site. With the ever-dwindling attention spans of humans, if shoppers have to spend too long trying to make sense of anything about your checkout process, you’ll lose them. This is especially true if they’re doing comparison shopping, and they have several other tabs open of sites selling the same products.
Still, once customers show an intent to purchase, you can always use exit-intent pop-ups to get some of their attention if they’re leaving without purchasing. As an example, you can offer them a discount.
Or for those who have added items to their cart already and are about to leave without buying, you can offer to email them their cart. That serves two purposes: you can contact them in the future, and they’re less likely to abandon their cart too.
A study by Barilliance shows that the “email-me-my-cart” email converts significantly higher than other types of email including conventional cart abandonment emails.
When you make the entire shopping experience a smooth one for shoppers on your site, you’ll lower your bounce rate.
Thankfully, a high bounce rate is not irreversible. If you follow these tips, you’ll not only lower your bounce rates but you’ll be smiling all the way to the bank. What are you waiting for?
Guest author: Vikas Agrawal is a start-up Investor & co-founder of the Infographic design agency Infobrandz that offers creative and premium visual content solutions to medium to large companies. Content created by Infobrandz are loved, shared & can be found all over the internet on high authority platforms like HuffingtonPost, Businessinsider, Forbes , Tech.co & EliteDaily.
The post How to Reduce Your eCommerce Bounce Rates by 30-40% Using Personalization appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Influencer marketing campaigns can be tricky and time consuming without the right plan. If you want today’s social tastemakers to amplify your content’s reach and power of persuasion, here are some key considerations to keep in mind. Continue reading
The post Get a Plan: How to Make the Most of Influencer Marketing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Scrolling through social media platforms can be an irritating experience. Too many brands and individuals don’t use their digital megaphones effectively. What are they doing wrong? Read on for 22 of the biggest social media pet peeves. Continue reading
The post 22 Things You Wish Marketers Would Stop Doing on Social Media appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
With almost 3 million websites powered by WooCommerce (to be exact, at the time of writing 2,906,789), it is without a doubt the most popular eCommerce platform and there are many reasons for this. One being the massive amount of free WooCommerce plugins available at the WordPress repository that you can grab and, in a matter of minutes, boost your shop and sales.
The WordPress community is very active and adding some marvelous, new WooCommerce plugins each day which means that it can be quite easy to miss a flawless gem in this ocean of information. Therefore I decided to take a dive into it and see if I can bring up a couple of pearls that could make your business better and everyday life as a shopkeeper smoother.
Note: The list is randomly ordered. Most of them are less than a year old and therefore many do not have a huge user base. I have tested them all myself prior to including them.
Here is a list of 12 new and free WooCommerce plugins to boost your online shop and sales in 2019.
Who doesn’t like a good bargain with a salesman to gain a discount, fun or simply a feeling of satisfaction, right? eBay and Amazon have been offering this feature for years because it drives additional sales.
Offers for WooCommerce provides similar functionality and allows you to:
This is an excellent solution for shops that specialize in selling fine art, collectible items, used items, and bulk orders since you can allow your potential customers to make an offer and get a discount on those orders.
Abandoned carts, just in the United Kingdom alone, yearly result in about 18 billion pounds of lost sales (according to a Barclaycard survey). It’s a rich and fruitful garden just waiting for you to start harvesting. This plugin is an excellent way to open the gates to this garden.
The WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture – Save Abandoned Carts plugin is capturing abandoned carts as soon as the user enters their phone number or email address at the Checkout without even submitting the form. Those users who are signed in do not even have to do that – their carts are captured from the moment the first product is added to their carts. What I love about this plugin is the:
The Save Abandoned Carts Pro plugin will allow you to integrate with MailChimp and use it to send automated Abandoned Cart recovery emails.
If you are currently not tracking and recovering your Abandoned carts, then you should definitely reconsider your sales strategy because this is a field where you can increase your sales big time.
According to research by BrightLocal, 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Customer reviews are essential when it comes to showing off and selling online products. WooCommerce offers customer reviews by default, but it lacks many features that the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin provides:
I have used this plugin and it has got both great support and features that will increase your sales.
There have been quite a few times when I come across a website that has the product I need, but comparing the prices is quite difficult due to a different currency that I’m used to. Yes, I know that there are free converters all over the internet, but it is an extra step, extra effort from my side and sometimes I’m just too lazy. This can leave a bad mark on your sales results and that is where the Currency Switcher for WooCommerce plugin comes in. The free version offers:
This plugin will help you boost your international sales.
Research by Timothy Derdenger and Vineet Kumar revealed that offering product bundles can have a very positive effect on sales if the products in the bundle are cheaper than if both products were to be bought separately. This is how Nintendo skyrocketed their sales by approximately 100,000 units when bundles (a video game console and a game sold together as one package) were offered.
Main features I like about this plugin:
The WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce plugin is a great way to boost your sales in case you can offer product bundles. If McDonald’s can do this then why couldn’t you?! 
Have you ever thought about buying a gift card? Statistics show that 56% of all purchased presents are gift cards. And for the most part, customers who purchase gift cards do that because they do not enjoy breaking their heads whether the person already has all the “Harry Potter” books or not. Instead, they are enabling recipients to buy their own desired gifts which is very convenient.
The free version of PW WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin enables you to:
In case you are running a shop that consists of many cool products, you should consider adding the ability to purchase gift cards.
If you are offering a discount or free shipping on your order once you reach a certain total amount in your shopping cart, you might as well just add something extra just to get the bonus, right?!
First Order Discount WooCommerce is a small, but a clever plugin that allows you to offer discounts to customers and increase the overall sales by providing an incentive:
I have not tested this approach in the live battleground, but I sure would love to try it out to see the results it brings on my next project. I have seen many large companies using this type of approach.
Personalization is a trend that is here to stay since people are feeling the need to be more unique and original. The Woocommerce Product Addons plugin allows you to add custom fields to your product ordering page thus enabling your customers to fill in some personalization details like additional text, custom color options and many other field types.
If you are a small shop owner looking to make your way into a personalized product business – this is a great, little plugin to get you started.
While the WooCommerce Additional Variation Images Gallery plugin might not increase your sales directly, it might help you to better showcase each of your product variations with additional variation galleries – something that is not possible using the default WooCommerce setup.
This is a technique that many of the large eCommerce companies are using today and it is easy to understand why.
This addition to your business will not increase your sales, at least not for the first time customers, but it might land you additional returning customers if you tailor the whole experience down to the email designs. It will definitely help you to stand out and render you as a professional striving for perfection.
Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer itself is super easy to use and I love the way it is integrated with the built-in WordPress template designer user interface:
The WooCommerce Login/Signup Popup is a small and simple plugin for allowing a more seamless and uninterrupted shopping experience for your registered users. You no longer will need to send your users to a separate page:
Not all products require additional documents to display some extra information, but if you are selling products that could use some additional documents with them – the WooCommerce Product Attachment plugin provides an easy to setup option for uploading product attachments.
The great part about this plugin is how easy it is to setup and that you can mark each document if it should be available prior to a successful payment or not.
This concludes my list of free WooCommerce plugins to boost your online shop and sales in 2019.
The WordPress plugin repository is a massive ocean of interesting and helpful products just waiting to be uncovered. And it has been truly a curious experience to plunge myself into to find plugins that will help me (and hopefully somebody else as well) in the future to improve their sales game.
Please feel free to add your thoughts and insights down in the comments if there is a gem I have missed
Guest author: Nauris is a freelance designer/developer who loves to dig into the UX as much as in the ground for fishing worms. And fishing is just one amongst the long list of his active lifestyle hobbies. Always positive and happy to meet new friends and share his experience. You can reach him on LinkedInor via his freelance website.
The post 12 New WooCommerce Plugins That Could Boost Your Online Sales In 2019 appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
