Author: Content Curator

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Want to jump straight to the answer? — The best website builder for ecommerce for most of us, is Shopify.

Launching an online store and trying to decide among the best ecommerce website builders, but don’t know which one’s right for you? They all seem to promise the same things: gorgeous templates, robust analytics, effortless inventory management, wonderful customer support.

I’ve got you covered. I took a look at all of the options to find the best website builder for creating an online store.

In my research, I paid attention to the following criteria:

Functionality — The major difference between an ecommerce site builder and a “normal” website builder is you’re going to be running your business off this platform. It needs to accept payments instantly and securely. It needs to have a useful dashboard to monitor traffic, sales, and inventory. It needs to keep have a cart the makes buying easy, and a system for calculating shipping.
Ease of use — There should be an easy way to add and remove products, an easy way to see your analytics, and an intuitive sales dashboard that can serve as your home base.
Design — The templates should look good out of the box and be easy to customize without expert (read: $$) help; and the designs should be pretty hard … Read More

We’ve covered the high-level strategy of building an online store that makes real money here.

But how do you create the ecommerce website itself?

In this guide, I’ll cover the 9 steps you need to take to create an ecommerce site in this guide. I’ve broken this guide into four sections:

The Prep Work — These are the things you’ll need to do before you start customizing your actual shop
The Framework — In this section I’ll help you pick the right theme for your online store
The Build — You’ll actually customize and create the ecommerce website in this phase
Get Paid — Connect a payments processor to your store and set the right prices

More specifically, this guide includes:

The one and only ecommerce tool we use to build our sites
The payment setting that can accidentally reduce your revenue by increasing refunds and chargebacks
The biggest myth of pricing and how real ecommerce website owners set their prices
What to put on your homepage to convert more customers
What an SSL certificate is and why you need one (also how to get one for free)
How to create an ecommerce website that’s profitable

You don’t need to finish all four phases in a day, though you could take a rough first draft approach and whip through them in a day, then iterate from there. Your choice! Let’s get building.

The Prep Work: Before You Build Your Ecommerce Website

Before we get into the actual work, I nee… Read More

Are you ashamed of your email marketing campaigns?

There’s nothing worse than seeing a digital campaign become stagnant. While it’s easy to set up a sales funnel, or create a newsletter, and start building your list of subscribers. That’s not a success.

Success is turning these curious prospects into engaged customers. And if you’re not cultivating lasting relationships with your email subscribers, you’re failing.

Knowing how to effectively persuade and influence your email subscribers in a way that makes them take the next step in their customer journey is vital.

One of the most common ways to monitor the success of an email marketing campaign is through the conversion rate. This is the percentage of your email recipients who open the email, click through to your website, and complete a set desired action. This action is usually making a purchase, but could be anything from completing a survey to booking a free consultation.

So, before we dive into the proven strategies to increase your email marketing conversion rates, let’s tackle a question that marketers are asking in 2019…

Is email marketing dead?

With the speed of technolog… Read More

SEO is one of the youngest marketing disciplines out there, and it’s also incredibly fast-paced. It looks almost nothing like what it did when we started.

While the fundamental principle remains the same —SEO is about making websites easy to find and understand — the tactics involved are very different than they were 15, 5, and even 1 year ago

So what are the most important SEO trends for 2020 and how can you implement them?

Here’s what you should know for 2020, as well as key steps for implementing these trends and tactics.

SEO Trend #1: Mobile and Voice Search

We don’t yet know how big voice search is, but we do know that mobile search is going strong, and we have many sources to confirm that, including:

Back in 2015, Google revealed that more people were using mobile search than desktop search in 10 countries, including the US and Japan
In 2018, more than half of mobile traffic in the US was coming from mobile devices
Last year consumers spent three and a half hours a day on their mobile devices

Consumers spend three and a half hours a day on their mobile devices.
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Consequently… Read More

Maintaining steady growth is critical to company performance and the long-term survival of a business. However, most business owners are neither able to identify their bottlenecks nor discover new opportunities to expand.

In this article, I want to introduce you to eleven marketing and sales tools to dissect your competitors and identify the gaps in your business. These tools are not mainstream, but they are powerful.

You can leverage them to fix the bottlenecks of your growth, streamline your business operations, and grow your business. Without further ado, here’s the first tool.

1. Nightwatch

For pursuing SEO and content marketing effectively, you need to measure your performance and analyze traffic trends. Nightwatch can be your go-to tool for tracking your search visibility.

Its backlinks tool shows you how the links you build are affecting the traffic to yo… Read More