One of the main reasons people shop online in the first place is convenience, so it only makes sense to grease your online store’s wheels as much as possible.

Your efforts should be focused on your checkout, because that’s the make-or-break section of the buying process. Once the customer has decided that they want to give you their money, your job is to get them through it as quickly as possible, with a minimum amount of pauses that might give them time to reconsider that decision.

The fewer clicks it takes for a visitor to complete a purchase, the better, so here are some ways to start shaving them off.

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If you’re trying to start a new online store, or make over a floundering one, it’s a good idea to find a niche. If you have a niche, you need to know how to market to it.

Most of the ways to market a specialty store online are the same ways you’d market any other one, but applied differently. In short, there’s more of a focus on marketing aggressively to a relatively small community, mostly made up of enthusiasts who can’t find their favorite variety of widget at any other stores.

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Most online store design rules are common sense, e.g. no music players unless you’re selling music. I think we’ve all got a handle on that one – it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone break it.

There are others that should be common sense, too, but some people still don’t follow them. Like the one that says you need to double-check your spelling, because if you can’t get their/there/they’re down, no one’s going to trust you with their credit card information. But those are still simple enough that we don’t need to spell them out again (and again).

The ones we’re interested in are the ones that aren’t intuitive, or that many online businesspeople – especially the newer ones – might not have even realized they’re breaking.

So if your e-store includes any of the following items, remove them immediately. They’re giving your viewers eyestrain, killing your conversion rate, and hurting your attempts to be taken seriously.

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When you’re building an online store, you should never settle for just one web design. Instead, you can keep improving appearance just like you’d strive to keep improving products and services.

One way to do this is to continually make incremental changes that improve your design and the most effective way to do this is through A/B testing.

Most online marketers know the importance of A/B testing but today we’re going to talk about how it can be applied to the navigation menu, extremely important in directing the flow of traffic where you want it to go and well worth testing as meticulously as you would any other page.

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Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to speak at WordCamp Providence about the Flexibility of WooCommerce – my first WordCamp Presentation! Couldn’t make it? Don’t worry, neither could I.

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Your brand story is what separates you from everyone else.  It’s the reason why anyone should care you exist. But what is it, exactly? The simple answer is “your business itself.” Everything you do is part of it. Everything you are is part of it. Why you started, what you do every day, how you treat your employees (that one’s far more important to the story than many entrepreneurs realize), how you interact with customers, the content of your ads, the design scheme you choose to represent it—everything. It’s not just a linear narrative of how you founded your business and how it grew to its current incarnation.

Your challenge, however, is to figure out how to wrap all that up into a few paragraphs your customers can read and understand. Of course, this isn’t totally possible, but being interesting should take place over being comprehensive, so you don’t even need to put everything in there anyway.

Okay, enough intro. Let’s begin.

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Remember that the first goal of blogging is not just to get more traffic, but to get a specific outcome. You want more subscribers, more sales, or more people engaging with your brand.

Despite the internet’s collective dream of “going viral,” that’s not the best way to build a customer base. Having a million hits on one post – and no others – won’t do much for your business. Traffic on its own isn’t very useful if it doesn’t convert.

So instead of aiming for massive popularity, it’s better to steadily build interest in your brand among an audience that may be smaller but more devoted.

There’s a process to this, and it’s often difficult to get right, but I’ll take you through the basics you need to get started:

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Technically, a landing page is any website your customers arrive on.  However, the term is usually used to refer to a standalone web page distinct from your main website that’s been designed for the strict purpose of selling something or gathering information. As such, you might have guessed they’re important. Landing pages are where visitors become leads and where the curious become the interested.

It often takes a ton of trials and edits to craft a good landing page, but all of them have a few things in common. In this article, I’ll tell you what they are and how you can nail them on your first try.

To start with, make sure you…

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Gearing up for the big launch of your online store can be a bit overwhelming.

After all, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Is your site as good as it can be? Are your products interesting enough to capture attention? Is there a market for them?

These are things that you take care of in the early planning stages of your business – when it’s more of an “on paper” thing than a “real” thing. I’m going to assume you’ve got your bases covered on that stuff.

For now, I want to talk about the things you need to do right before you hit publish on that e-commerce site you’ve been working on day and night. Those things that, when done properly, can launch your business head and shoulders above the competition.

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Your “About” page is one of the most visited on your site. As such, it’s one of the most common entry points into your sales funnel. For the uninitiated, the sales funnel is a nickname for the entire process that takes a viewer from clicking an inbound link on your page to buying something. The minute a lead clicks on a link that leads to your website, they’ve entered the funnel, which is why your website’s whole design should contribute towards pulling them deeper in. So, as you might’ve imaged, it’s vitally important to put the effort into crafting a good one.

Used properly, it can even do a lot of the heavy lifting of converting leads into sales, and an effective one can go a long way towards making you look like a friendly, trustworthy business. Which is important, since people tend to buy from brands they’re familiar with, who they trust, and whose image they like. Makes sense, right?

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Before we dive into this complex topic, there’s one thing I need to get out of the way:

No matter what type of marketing campaign you’re working on, I can’t overstate the importance of analytics. Top online marketers are able to achieve conversion rates over three times higher than their competition just by virtue of investing in analytics, testing, and optimizing.

Try to leave room for changes in the design of your campaigns. And, as data comes in, start thinking of ways to change them to accommodate your customers. That way, you can make immediate use of what you’re learning about what works and what doesn’t. Make a habit of conducting A/B testing for all of your marketing efforts. Let the data you receive determine which option you should go with over the long term.

That said, in this post, I’ll briefly run through several forms of marketing and touch on some fundamental ways to implement them. Some of this advice may seem simplistic, but you’d be surprised how far you’ll get just by making sure you’re doing these things. A lot of that has to do with the fact that many of your competitors are doing them!

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What is “Big Data,” anyway?

It’s hard to define, and made even more difficult by the world’s inability to agree on what it is.

One generally-accepted standard was laid out by analyst Doug Laney in 2001, and has been in constant use ever since. It’s called “The 3 Vs,” short for volume, variety, and velocity. In other words, Big Data is “a large amount of stuff, being generated very quickly, and incorporating a wide variety of content.” However, some people disagree with this definition, claiming that’s an oversimplification or that other metrics need to be used. Still others claim that Big Data is just “anything too big to deal with in an Excel spreadsheet.”

But no matter how you personally choose to define it, the truth is that it’s a catch-all term for any data sets too large to process using conventional methods. It can sometimes take parallel software running on thousands of servers just to handle it.

Intimidating stuff.

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First of all, if you’re not offering coupon codes yet, you should be. It’ll definitely have an impact on your sales. The variety of online options for buying the same thing has trained customers to hunt for the best deals on everything. With twenty people selling a particular model of widget, it’s always wise to comparison-shop and your take their time to find the best deal on that particular item.

That’s why offering discounts can give you a distinct advantage in an indecisive customer’s mind.

In order for coupons to work to your maximum benefit, you have to know how to implement them. That’s why today, I’ll go over some ways to do just that.

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Let’s get this out of the way: lead capturing is just giving people what they’re looking for.

To expand on that definition, it’s the process of guiding them in the direction of information that’ll get them interested in you.

It begins as soon as they see your ad and click on it, ends when they buy a product, and is implemented through what’s called a Lead Capture System.

A Lead Capture System, or Lead Management System, is really just a fancy term for your website’s sales process.

It consists of targeted marketing, a landing page with clear instructions for what you want them to do and how to get in contact with you, and finally, a way of getting in touch with them afterwards.

Let’s take those steps in order.

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Nine out of ten buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.

That alone should convince you they’re important. But, if you need another statistic, half of your customers trust reviews more than the opinions of their own friends and family – especially when it comes to major purchases like cars, computers and travel accommodations.

Reviews are also crucial for local SEO, making up a tenth of your ranking factors. When people Google your company, many of the first-page results will be from review sites. So it’s crucial that there’s something on them.

However, as we’ve mentioned in a previous article, trying to buy them will almost always work against you. Various sites have started to come down on people who’ve been caught messing with their reviews, and you definitely don’t want to end up wasting your money on something that’ll just get you banned. Most fake reviewers are pretty inept at hiding it, anyway. We wish we had a dime for every Amazon review that sounds like it was written by a grinning telemarketer.

So, how do you get genuine reviews? Well, if you have a customer base established, you can…

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7 out of 10 customers abandon their shopping carts.

This is obviously a problem. Rusting carts litter the urban landscape, fuel the illegal scrapping industry, and…wait, wrong kind of carts.

I’m actually talking about the online variety, the abandonment of which is creating an even greater problem. People leaving e-stores in the middle of purchases cost retailers an estimated $18 billion annually.

But some experts suspect that it’s not the abandonment itself that’s the problem. In fact, it seems to be a normal part of the process leading to the decision to buy. The problem is that it took the e-commerce world too long to realize that.

Just a few years ago, 81% of online retailers assumed that the minute the browser window was closed, that was the end of the sales process. However, recent numbers are showing that with the right methods, plenty of wayward leads can be pulled back and converted into loyal customers.

But first, you have to know…

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